Ancient martyrs, fighting rules and disappearing cats – take the Boxing Day Thursday quiz

It is Boxing Day, and these questions are going to sock it to you. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

The Thursday quiz cares not for your so-called Christmas traditions and bank holiday. It is Thursday, and so here we are, regardless of whether it is a national holiday in the UK or not. Although in reality, the quiz master is stuffed full of yesterday’s Christmas dinner and off to see Leyton Orient at home to Crawley Town, before stuffing himself again with festive leftovers, and actually wrote this weeks ago, with every question in it loosely tied to boxes. Have fun, guess well, and a very happy new year to you all!

The Thursday quiz, No 190

1. 

   A cheery question to start with. Boxing Day is St Stephen's Day. In which horrible way was St Stephen (not pictured, that is the quiz master) martyred?

   1. Crucified upside down

   2. Stoned to death

   3. Tied to a post and shot with arrows

   4. Made to listen to Coldplay on a loop

2. 

   Boxing Day was made a bank holiday in England by the Bank Holidays Act of which year?

   1. 1771

   2. 1831

   3. 1871

   4. 1931

3. 

   Schrödinger's cat (both pictured and not pictured) is probably the most famous cat ever to get into a box. Schrödinger proposed the thought experiment during an exchange of letters with who, about what?

   1. With Albert Einstein about quantum states

   2. With Marie Curie about ways of measuring radiation

   3. With Niels Bohr about the properties of the atom

   4. With Mr Blobby about Noel's House Party

4. 

   What is the name for the set of rules formulated for the sport of boxing published in 1867?

   1. Horseferry rules

   2. Queensberry rules

   3. Barberry rules

   4. Ronald rules

5. 

   Which singer, more famous for being part of an exciting modern young beat combo, had a solo album called Tomorrow's Modern Boxes?

   1. Damon Albarn of Blur

   2. Julian Casablancas of the Strokes

   3. Thom Yorke of Radiohead

   4. Russell Mael of Sparks

6. 

   One of painter René Magritte's famous works (not pictured) is called Pandora's Box. Where did Magritte come from?

   1. Lelystad in the Netherlands

   2. Lille in France

   3. Lancy in Switzerland

   4. Lessines in Belgium

7. 

   OMD had a lovely single in 1991 called Pandora's Box, about Louise Brooks. In 1929 she starred in two films directed by GW Pabst – Pandora's Box and …?

   1. Diary of a Lost Girl

   2. Mantrap

   3. The Wind

   4. The Blue Angel

8. 

   Who originally did the narrated voiceover on Gogglebox when it hit British screens in 2013?

   1. Diane Morgan

   2. Catherine Tate

   3. Miranda Hart

   4. Caroline Aherne

9. 

   Three of these are legitimate names for Ikea box storage solutions. Spot the odd one out.

   1. Sockerbit

   2. Uppsnofsad

   3. Vildsvin

   4. Knagglig

10. 

    The South African men's national rugby union team is commonly known as the Springboks (Spring-box, geddit?) What is the nickname of the South African women's rugby union team?

    1. Proteas

    2. Bafana Bafana

    3. Pumas

    4. Springbok Women

11. 

    This is Willow, the official dog of the Guardian thursday quiz. She wants to know, if you put down the six-letter word 'boxing' on a standard English Scrabble board, what does the value of the letters on the tiles add up to?

    1. 12

    2. 14

    3. 16

    4. 18

12. 

    Boxing Day is the anniversary of the premiere of the first collaboration between dramatist WS Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. Most of the music is now lost, but what was it called?

    1. Thespis

    2. Theseus

    3. Serapis

    4. Sepsis

13. 

    Boxing Day is the birthday of Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica. Happy birthday Lars! Where was he born?

    1. Sweden

    2. Denmark

    3. Norway

    4. Finland

14. 

    In what year did David Blaine do that weird thing of staying for 44 days in a transparent box suspended in the air by the River Thames?

    1. 1998

    2. 2003

    3. 2008

    4. 2013

15. 

    This is getting to be a stretch now, but if you had a box set of the plays published in Shakespeare's First Folio in 1623, how many plays would you have?

    1. There were 26 plays in Shakespeare's First Folio

    2. There were 29 plays in Shakespeare's First Folio

    3. There were 33 plays in Shakespeare's First Folio

    4. There were 36 plays in Shakespeare's First Folio

Solutions

1:B - He is believed to have been stoned to death around about 33–36 AD, 2:C - The act made it a bank holiday in England and Wales, and in Ireland, which the Westminster parliament at that point legislated for. Scotland didn't get it as an official bank holiday until the whole act was repealed and replaced in 1971, 3:A - Erwin Schrödinger was trying to take the idea to an extreme to illustrate what he saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, 4:B - They were endorsed by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, and as he was posh, they got named after him, even though they were written by John Graham Chambers from Llanelli, 5:C - The album came out in 2014 and was released via a BitTorrent bundle because that was the vogue at the time, as was tying an onion to your belt, 6:D - He was famously a Belgian surrealist. Aren't we all, at heart?, 7:A - She played Thymian in that. The other movie options were vehicles for Clara Bow, Lillian Gish and Marlene Dietrich, 8:D - The Thursday quiz misses her :-(, 9:C - Those are feral hogs, not boxes, are are often found in groups of 30 to 50, 10:D - How imaginative, 11:C - It is 16. You get eight for the X, three for the G, two for the B and one each for all the other letters. However, you would score more in an actual game, because it is impossible to put down a six-letter word that doesn't hit one of the special squares, 12:A - Subtitled 'or The Gods Grown Old', it premiered in London at the Gaiety Theatre on 26 December 1871, 13:B - He was born in 1963 in Gentofte in Denmark, and hits those drums very, very hard, 14:B - The endurance feat began on 5 September 2003 and Blaine apparently survived on nothing but 4.5 litres of water per day, 15:D - There were 36 plays in the collection, and amazingly, more than 200 copies of it have survived to the modern day

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got in the comments!

Why not celebrate Boxing Day by enjoying Britain’s best new band the New Eves playing Mother at the Green Man festival?

Mother by the New Eves recorded live at the Green Man festival sessions