Series 47, episode 1

2017

Edinburgh vs Ulster

vs 160

I. Wingspans:


 * white witch moth - up to 30cm
 * large flying fox - 1.5m or more
 * wandering albatross - 3.63m
 * Hughes H-4 Hercules 'Spruce Goose' [interrupted] [97.82m]

Bonuses: on travel guides

I.i. 'All you've got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over - so go.' Lonely Planet motto, founded in 1970s by Maureen and Tony Wheeler

I.ii. Mr Mrs Smith

I.iii. Baedeker

II. 'Cyber-' derives from an Ancient Greek word for 'steersman'

Bonuses: identify the Shakespeare tragedies in which appear these lines on fate, fortune and destiny

II.i. 'An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish' disposition to the charge of a star.

II.ii. 'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well when our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us there's a divinity' that shapes our ends. Rough-hew them how we will. Hamelt

II.iii. 'Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.' Julius Caesar

III. The French scientist (Joseph-Louis) Lagrange gives his name to an equilibrium point in astronomy: the Lagrange point. Lagrange was the author of Analytic Mechanics and contemporary of (Pierre-Simon) Laplace and (Antoine) Lavoisier, once said: 'If I had been rich, I probably would not have devoted myself to mathematics.'

Bonuses: on Britain and Australia

III.i. Australia first hosted the Summer Olympics in 1956 in Melbourne

III.ii. In 1966 Australia replace pounds shillings and pence with dollars and cents. Decimal currency was introduced in the UK in 1971.

III.iii. Margaret Thatcher became the UK's first woman Prime Minister in 1979 and Julia Gillard became Australia's in 2009.

IV. In the 1870s Lord Lytton, Governor-General of India described Afghanistan as 'an earthen pipkin between two metal pots'. British forces made two interventions there [interrupted]

Bonuses: on biochemistry

IV.i. Acetyl coenzyme is the basic building block for fatty acid synthesis

IV.ii. The first reaction of the fatty acid biosynthetic pathway involves the carboxylation of acetyl-CoA to form malonyl-CoA, for which vitamin B7, biotin, acts as a coenzyme

IV.iii. The elongation of the fatty acid chain to 16 or 18 carbons occurs with the help of the protein cofactor ACP: acyl carrier protein

Picture round one: the routes of significant expeditions

P1. Darwin's route on the Beagle in the 1830s captained by Robert Fitzroy

P1.i. 1846 Donner/Donner-Reed Party

P1.ii. 1611 Henry Hudson, ended in mutiny

P1.iii. 1577 Sir Francis Drake

V. Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto and the British artist Winifred Knights painted versions of the Wedding Feast at Cana, the occasion of the first miracle attributed to Jesus in John's Gospel

Bonuses: on works composed while their author was in prison

V.i. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boetheius, translated form Latin into English by Alfred the Great and Elizabeth I, written while Boethius was imprisoned by Theodoric the Great

V.ii. Malory's Morte d'Arthur, an English prose narrative printed by Caxton in 1485 believed to have been written by an incarcerated Warwickshire knight before 1470

V.iii. De Profundis, published posthumously in 1905, title from the first two words of a psalm in the Vulgate

VI. The wide tract of forest and saltwater swamp known as the Sundarbans forms the lower part of the delta of the Ganges (Brahmaputra?)

Bonuses: on Mexico

VI.i. Coahuila, the third largest Mexican state is about twice the size of Scotland and similar in size to Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated in the world.

VI.ii. Sonora is the second largest Mexican state, shares its name with a major desert and is bounded to the west by the Gulf of California

VI.iii. Chihuahua is the largest Mexican state, about the size of the UK, situated between Sonora and Coahuila

VII. In mathematics, parity is defined as the attribute of being either odd or even. In economics, parity appears in the theory of exchange rates purchase power parity (PPP)

Bonuses: on football and poetry

VII.i. Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem Achilles after David Beckham injured his Achilles tendon in 2010

ViI.ii. Don Paterson

VII.iii. Simon Armitage

Music round: on Howard Goodall's themes for television

Blackadder theme

Vicar of Dibley

Mr Bean

Red Dwarf

VIII. Cranberry, the dwarf shrub Vaccinium oxycoccus, is named after the crane

Bonuses: on animals whose common name closely resembles their scientific name

e.g. the Western gorilla, Gorilla gorilla

VIII.i. Bison

VIII.ii. Iguana

VIII.iii. Lynx

IX. Charles Fourier (born 1772) thought that the sea would turn into pink lemonade

Bonuses: on SI base units in physics

IX.i. 'between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom'

IX.ii. Ampere 'a force equal to 2 x 10 to the -17 Newton per metre of length'

IX.iv. Candela 1/683 watt per steradian

X. An isotonic solution has the same osmotic pressure as another

Bonuses: on US Nobel laureate Jody Williams

X.i. Jody William received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for work for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines

X.ii. From 1986-1992 Williams was deputy director of a medical aid organization in El Salvador

X.iii.

XI. Sycophant

Bonuses: on a Yorkshire landowning family

XI.i. Sir Tatton Sykes was an inveterate restorer of churches, mainly in the East Riding, employing G. E. Street and Temple Moore

XI.ii. Sir Tatton's son Mark Sykes was a diplomat who have his name, in part, to the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty concerning the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire

XI.iii. Sir Mark Sykes's son Christopher wrote the biography of Evelyn Waugh

Picture round 2: photographs of actors who have won both a Tony and an Oscar for the same role

P2. Photo of Yul Brynner

P2.i. Joel Grey

P2.ii. Paul Scofield

P2.iii. Rex Harrison

XII. East Prussia

Bonuses: on the films of Martin Scorsese

XIII. Minor characters in Middlemarch include Borthrop Trumbull, Mrs Cadwallader, wife of the Rector of Tipton and Freshitt, the Tory lawyer Frank Hawley and the lady's maid Tantrip.

Bonuses: on words that contain 'ergo'

XIII.i. Pergola

XIII.ii. Scattergood

XIII.iii. Ergotism, particularly associated with rye

XIV. George I's reign (1712-27) saw the publications of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver's Travels (1726), the death of Sir Isaac Newton (1726/7) and the bursting of the South Sea Bubble (1720)

XV. Tachycardia is the Greek-dervied term for a heart rate above 100bpm

Bonuses: on the seven summits as defined by the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, i.e. the highest mountain on each continent

XIV.i. Kilimanjaro: 3.06 degrees S, 37.36 degrees E

XIV.ii. Aconcagua: 32.65 degrees S, 70.02 degrees W

XIV.iii. 27.99 degrees N, 89.93 degrees W

XIV. Alice says of Jabberwocky in Through the Looking Glass: 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas, only I don't know exactly what they are.'