Sad fruit, giant pandas and a host of birthday joy – take the Thursday quiz

Giant pandas enjoy a birthday, but which mammal family should they invite to the party? Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

Unbelievably the Thursday quiz is one year old this week. One whole year! As usual, it consists of 15 questions that are either general knowledge or vaguely topical – but maybe with a little more of a birthday twist. I originally pitched it with the words: “I think we should start it next week, and then if after five weeks it looks like it is going well, I will make the next batch.”

I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has taken the quiz, and especially those of you who have joined in so regularly and joyously in the comments. I hope you have fun today, but remember, there are no prizes. Let us know how you get on.

The Thursday quiz, No 53

1. 

   MUSIC: As it is a birthday edition, we will start with a birthday question. Which album by the Beatles features the track Birthday?

   1. Let It Be (also known as 'the awkward splitting up album')

   2. Abbey Road (also known as 'the zebra crossing album')

   3. Revolver (also known as 'actually their best album')

   4. The Beatles (also known as 'the White album')

   5. Kate Bush (also known as 'desperately shoe-horning a running gag in')

2. 

   ALSO HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND ALSO MUSIC: It is Kim Gordon's birthday today. Happy birthday, Kim! But which iconic American alternative rock band did she brilliantly play guitar and bass for?

   1. Sonic Youth

   2. Violent Femmes

   3. Dinosaur Jr

   4. John Smith and the Common Men

3. 

   AN EXERCISE BICYCLE FOR THE MIND: It would have been beloved author Terry Pratchett's birthday today too. We miss you Terry. How many Discworld novels by him have been published?

   1. 29

   2. 36

   3. 41

   4. 48

4. 

   THE PLAY'S THE THING: What are the names of the two mysterious men who turn up in Harold Pinter's 1967 play The Birthday Party?

   1. Ben and Gus

   2. Mick and Aston

   3. Goldberg and McCann

   4. Garron and Unstoffe

5. 

   SCIENCE CORNER BUT WITH PANDAS: Which of these families of mammals do giant pandas belong to?

   1. Procyonidae

   2. Peramelidae

   3. Otariidae

   4. Ursidae

6. 

   TUTTI FRUTTI: Which world leader was inexplicably greeted in Japan by some mournfully dancing kiwi fruit last week?

   1. Australia's prime minister Scott Morrison

   2. South Africa's president Cyril Ramaphosa

   3. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro

   4. New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern

7. 

   SECRETS OF THE STARS: A six mile sculpture trail that models the solar system to scale called Our Place in Space is opening where in the UK?

   1. Derry

   2. Wolverhampton

   3. Inverness

   4. Bangor

8. 

   A BIG SURPRISE: That's a 1977 Sparks song where 'It's boy meets girl and here we go once again'. But that's not important right now. ‘One-eyed Joe’, a Scottish cat that went missing for five years, was reunited with his owner after being found where?

   1. Edinburgh Castle

   2. An offshore oil rig

   3. Inside the Scottish Parliament Building in Holyrood

   4. At Faslane's nuclear submarine base

9. 

   STOP THIEF!: It was also Shakespeare's birthday at the weekend, and as a lovely present, an academic presented new research claiming that the bard had stolen the plot of which play from a now-lost play by Sir Thomas North?

   1. Two Gentlemen of Verona

   2. Timon of Athens

   3. Cymbeline

   4. Winter's Tale

10. 

    THE LIVES OF SAINTS: Saint Andrew is a patron saint of Barbados, Georgia, Cyprus and Scotland among other places. But traditionally what did he do before becoming one of the disciples of Jesus?

    1. Fisherman

    2. Carpenter

    3. Soldier

    4. Innkeeper

11. 

    FIBONACCI NUMBERS: First described in Indian mathematics, and forming a sequence where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, F₁₀ is 55. 55 is a triangular number. Which of these definitions BEST describes a triangular number?

    1. It has two digits the same and the square root is also the same digit

    2. It is the sum of consecutive numbers from one upwards that can be arranged visually in a triangle shape

    3. It is only divisible by 3 and by itself

    4. Its square can be split into two parts, where the second part has digits that add up to the original number

12. 

    WHY THE LONG FACE?: A horse's respiratory system is described as demonstrating 'obligate nasal breathing'. What does that mean?

    1. They only exhale from the nostrils, and inhale through the mouth

    2. They alternate breathing through different nostrils

    3. They have a special membrane that makes the nostrils water-tight when they are under water

    4. They can only breath through their nostrils, and not their mouth

13. 

    MINISTRY OF SCILLY LONG WALKS: Residents on the Isles of Scilly face a difficult, expensive and long journey for a vital public service now after it was announced the very last WHAT on the island was closing?

    1. Post office

    2. Bank branch

    3. Pub

    4. Library

14. 

    AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS: The website Wikivoyage lists 23 locations visited by fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel, none of them by hot air balloon. No 13 is Yokohama, Japan. But which year did Yokohama Stadium host the Rugby World Cup Final?

    1. 2016

    2. 2017

    3. 2018

    4. 2019

15. 

    AND FINALLY … SOME OLD NEWS: What was the lead story in the Guardian on the day the Thursday quiz first appeared, 29 April 2021?

    1. Arlene Foster to step down as Northern Ireland first minister

    2. Johnson urges caution as England takes first big step out of lockdown

    3. Golden Globes overshadowed by ethics controversy and criticism over lack of diversity

    4. European Super League: Premier League ‘big six’ sign up to competition

Solutions

1:D - Birthday opens side three of the 1968 album, a record which everybody agrees is too long and should just have been a single album, but nobody can agree on which tracks you would leave off, 2:A - Indeed, she was part of the seminal line-up along with Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley. The group disbanded in 2011 after releasing fifteen studio albums., 3:C - There are 41 of them, and the official website insists that they can be read in any order, 4:C - Pinter apparently based the characters of the lonely lodger (Stanley), the flirty landlady (Meg) and her quiescent husband (Petey) on a terrible lodging house he once stayed at in Eastbourne. It is not known whether anyone arrived to menace him on that occasion, 5:D - Molecular analysis has led to giant pandas being classified as the oldest member of the ursidae family. Their closeness biologically to the raccoons of the procyonidae had previously been a point of debate between biologists. Peramelidae are bandicoots, and Otariidae are eared seals, 6:D - As she arrived on her first trip abroad for two years, the two large mascots welcomed the prime minister with a gentle swaying routine, set to a piece of slow, somewhat sorrowful chamber music. They had a sombre audience of suited men. Everybody kept a straight face, 7:A - The solar system trail, which will later move to other locations in Northern Ireland and to Cambridge, has been designed by the artist and author Oliver Jeffers. Each planet model sits within a colourful arched sculpture placed along the trail in scale with the vast distance between each planet in the solar system. 'It makes the point that there’s an awful lot of space in space,' said Jeffers. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, 8:B - Workers at the rig inexplicably found him in a shipping container. You can tell by his face that Ron from Sparks knows how he got there, 9:C - Academic Michael Blanding claims a 1533 edition of Fabyan’s Chronicle, a compendium of British and French history from Roman times to Henry VII, bears notes in the margin in North’s hand that have been linked to the plot and other details of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy. To be honest, nobody rates Cymbeline anyway do they?, 10:A - He was the brother of Simon Peter, and according to tradition the two were called by Jesus to become 'fishers of men' instead. I was going to ask something about St George but to be honest I got so fed up of people smugly telling Twitter at the weekend that 'he wasn't even English, you know' that I went for a different Saint, 11:B - There's a very long formula to explain it – but essentially you get 55 if you add up all the numbers from one to ten, and you can stack them in a rather lovely triangle shape. There's a bit more to it, but that will do for Thursday quiz level mathematics. You know it couldn't be the other options because the square root of 55 is 7.41, because 55 is divisible by five and itself not three, and because the final option is actually the definition of a Kaprekar number, 12:D - Horses can't breath through their mouths. The epiglottis rests just above the soft palate while the animal is not swallowing, and creates an airtight seal that makes it physically impossible for horses to breathe in through their mouths unless there is some deformity, 13:B - A letter to Lloyds’ customers said that, following the closure, the nearest branch would be 44 miles away and accessible by the ferry to Penzance, Cornwall. The bank claimed that the number of people using the islands’ last remaining branch at least once a month was just 33, 14:D - It may feel like a lifetime ago, but It was as recently as 2019 that South Africa beat England 32-12. This round seemed like a good idea at the time. There's still ten more to go, 15:A - It was Arlene Foster, along with a story 'Speed at which world’s glaciers are melting has doubled in 20 years'. That particular lockdown in England ended in March, and the Golden Globes happen in February. The European Super League announcement – and rapid u-turn – was in April last year, but took place before the inaugural edition of the Thursday quiz, which pedants will know was initially called 'the new weekly quiz'

Scores

1. 0 and above.

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

• If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com, but remember, the quiz master’s word is always final, and he would also like to thank the production staff for helping him avoid many, many more errors along the way.