Only forty questions, but hopefully it'll provide a bit of revision and learning material for people, and hopefully you enjoy the questions!
Here goes - answers for all the categories are at the end:
Media
1
The title character in Miguel
Ángel
Asturias' novel, El Señor
Presidente, is said to
have been inspired by which Guatemalan dictator, in power from 1898
to 1920?
2
Which 2014 film won three Academy Awards, including that of Best
Supporting Actor for JK Simmons?
3
The 1978 work A Contract
with God is credited
with popularising the term “graphic novel”. Which American
cartoonist created it?
4
Which Swedish-speaking Finnish novelist was best known for her
creation of the Moomin
books for children?
5
Paraguay has two official languages. One, quite predictably, is
Spanish; sharing its name with the country's currency, what is the
other?
Culture
1 Krzywy Domek, which is
Polish for “crooked little house”, is an irregularly shaped
building in which seaside town on the coast of the Baltic Sea?
2 Supposedly coming from an
Akkadian word meaning “to build on a raised area”, what name was
given to the structures built in Mesopotamia that took the form of
step-pyramids on successive receding levels? The most famous was that
at the city of Ur.
3 French poet Guillaume
Apollinaire coined which term in 1912 to describe the offshoot of
cubism that involved brighter colours and greater abstraction?
Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and his wife, Sonia, were the main
exponents.
4 The artist Louise Bourgeois
was best known for her sculptures of which creatures? Her largest
such work, Maman, stands at over thirty feet tall.
5 Arising out of avidya
(ignorance) and characterised by dukkha (suffering), which
concept in Buddhism refers to the cycle of birth and rebirth?
Entertainment
1 “The Gnome”, “The Old
Castle”, “Cattle”, and “The Hut on Fowl's Legs” are
movements in which suite of 1874 by Modest Mussorgsky?
2 Which world music record
label was established by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne in
1988?
3 Created by Jenji Kohan and
based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, which US comedy-drama series first
released on Netflix in 2013 centres around life in a women's prison?
4 The Algerian
singer-songwriter Khaled is known as the “king” of which musical
genre that originated in his country from the music of Bedouin
shepherds?
5 A 1908 novel by Valery
Bryusov was the inspiration for a Sergei Prokofiev opera which first
premiered in 1955. What title was shared by both the novel and the
opera?
History
1 Which city served as the
capital of the Inca Empire from 1438 to 1533?
2 Who led the Russian Empire
at the 1812 Battle of Borodino?
3 Which US Army general
commanded military operations in the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1972,
at a time when US troop strength in South Vietnam fell from 543,000
to around 49,000?
4 Which South American country
fought a war from 1864 to 1870 against a so-called Triple Alliance of
Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay?
5 Commonly referred to as
Africa's Che Guevara, which Burkinabé
military captain was behind the name change of Burkina Faso from
Upper Volta, and served as president of the country from 1983 to 1987
prior to his assassination in a coup d'état?
Lifestyle
1 “Eat fresh” is the
slogan of which US fast-food franchise that has over 43,000 outlets
in over 100 countries worldwide?
2 Zara is the flagship
retailer (others include Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Massimo Dutti)
of which Spanish clothing conglomerate, the largest fashion group in
the world, that was co-founded by Amancio Ortega – now Spain's
richest man – in 1985?
3 Cachupa, a slow-cooked stew
of corn, beans, and fish or meat, is regarded as the national dish of
which island country?
4 Which fitness program that
has achieved worldwide popularity, incorporating elements of dance
and aerobics, was founded by Beto Perez in Colombia in 2001?
5 The disorder known as
plantar fasciitis affects which general part of the body?
Sciences
1 One of the rarest mammals on
earth, it is restricted to north-eastern Madagascar. The silky sifaka
is what type of animal?
2 Which chemical element, the
second-most abundant in the earth's crust, has atomic number 14 and a
name from the Latin for “hard stone”?
3 Which US physicist is the
only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in
1956 for the invention of the transistor, and then again in 1972 for
a theory of superconductivity?
4 The alligator family is made up of
two sub-families. One, unsurprisingly, is the alligator itself; which
group of relatively small crocodilians native to Central and South
America and Australia comprises the other?
5 Which Swedish botanist,
known as the father of modern taxonomy, gives his name to the system
of binomial nomenclature still in use today?
Sport
& Games
1 India has won every edition
of the World Cup held in this sport to date; what is the national
sport of Bangladesh and Nepal?
2 Which Italian mountaineer is
known for having been the first person to ascend Mount Everest
without supplemental oxygen, and for being the first person to ascend
all fourteen “eight-thousander” mountain peaks (peaks over 8,000m
above sea level)?
3 Who has been Test and ODI
captain for the Sri Lanka national cricket team since February 2013?
4 Upon winning the 2010 French
Open singles title, she became the first Italian woman to win a Grand
Slam singles title. With a career-high world no. 4 ranking achieved
in early 2011, which tennis player is this?
5 Which French swimmer and
three-time Olympic medallist tragically died in the 2015 Villa
Castelli helicopter collision while filming for a reality TV show?
World
1 Which major US city, the
most populous in its state, has been home to the world's busiest
airport by passenger traffic since 1998, is home to the headquarters
of The Coca-Cola Company, and held a major sporting event in 1996?
2 Divided into 100 sen, what
is the currency of Malaysia?
3 The first flyby is predicted
to occur in mid-July this year; what is the name of the NASA space
probe launched to study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons?
4 Which strait – on which
Balikpapan and Palu are ports - separates the islands of Borneo and
Sulawesi?
5 Which Australian serial
entrepreneur is regarded as the most prolific inventor in the world,
given that he has over 9,000 patents registered worldwide? His main
fields of invention include electronics and the internet.
Answers:
Media
1 Manuel Estrada Cabrera
2 Whiplash
3 Will Eisner
4 Tove Jansson
5 Guarani
Culture
1 Sopot
2 Ziggurat
3 Orphism
4 Spiders
5 Samsara
Entertainment
1 Pictures at an Exhibition
2 Luaka Bop
3 Orange Is the New Black
4 Raï
5 The Fiery Angel
History
1 Cusco
2 Mikhail Kutuzov
3 Creighton Abrams
4 Paraguay
5 Thomas Sankara
Lifestyle
1 Subway
2 Inditex
3 Cape Verde
4 Zumba
5 Foot
Sciences
1 Lemur
2 Silicon
3 John Bardeen
4 Caiman
5 Carl Linnaeus
Sport & Games
1 Kabaddi
2 Reinhold Messner
3 Angelo Mathews
4 Francesca Schiavone
5 Camille Muffat
World
1 Atlanta
2 Ringgit
3 New Horizons
4 Makassar Strait
5 Kia Silverbrook
