The Week’s Christmas quiz: looking back on 2021

1. Which scientist headed the Manhattan Project and what was its mission?

2. Which US state has the lowest population density? And which European country?

3. If you saw cornu aspersum in your garden, what would you be looking at?

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4. Which famous scientist’s last book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms?

5. Edwin Hubble – he of the telescope – is most famously associated with which scientific observation?

6. Which country is the only in modern history to have had a flag featuring just one colour?

7. Who is meant to have said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe”?

8. Which is the world’s newest country?

9. The name of which country is the only one in the world to contain all the vowels in a single word?

10. Only one South American country has a Pacific and Caribbean coast. Name it.

11. Which central American country is the only one without a Caribbean coast?

12. This river rises on the Tibetan plateau and travels through China, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Which is it?

13. What does an exobiologist study?

1. J. Robert Oppenheimer; to develop the atomic bomb, 2. Alaska; Iceland, 3. A garden snail, 4. Charles Darwin, 5. That the universe is expanding, 6. Libya, 7. Albert Einstein, 8. South Sudan, 9. Mozambique, 10. Colombia, 11. El Salvador, 12. The Mekong, 13. Astrobiology