Scooter bans, funeral plans and a whole stack of birds – take the Thursday quiz

This white-tailed eagle from Hungary is challenging you to a quiz. Photograph: Attila Kovács/EPA

This week the Thursday quiz lazily asked the ChatGPT AI bot to write the introductory blurb, and it said:

Welcome to this week’s Thursday Quiz, brought to you by Martin Belam. I hope you’re ready for some fun and challenging trivia, because we’ve got a great selection of questions for you today. From history and geography, to science and pop culture, there’s something for everyone. So grab a pen and paper and get ready to test your knowledge. Let’s get started!

So there you go. Let us know how you get on in the comments.

The Thursday quiz, No 91

1. 

   TO SCOOT OR NOT TO SCOOT: Which European capital city will hold a referendum on 2 April posing the question “Do we or don’t we continue with free-floating rental scooters?”

   1. Dublin

   2. Paris

   3. Rome

   4. Madrid

2. 

   THAT'S JUST NOT CRICKET: Which gaming community has been rocked by proposed changes to it licensing rules that appear to suggest in the future people will have to give a proportion of any revenue they generate from adding to the game back to the game company?

   1. Dungeons and Dragons

   2. Magic The Gathering

   3. World of Warcraft

   4. Horace Goes Skiing

3. 

   CANCEL CULTURE: In one of her first acts as governor of Arkansas, the former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is banning the use of which word in state documents?

   1. Afro-American

   2. Indigenous

   3. Abortion

   4. Latinx

4. 

   SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT: Which of these is the correct order of the first four albums released in Sweden by Abba?

   1. Ring Ring, Waterloo, ABBA, Arrival

   2. Ring Ring, ABBA, Arrival, Voulez-Vous

   3. Ring Ring, ABBA, Waterloo, Super Trouper

   4. Ring Ring, Waterloo, ABBA, Voyage

5. 

   ALL YOU EVER THINK ABOUT IS SEX: That is a 1983 song by Sparks where they think about the places they've had their little fun. But Norfolk has been in the news because there are a record number of what?

   1. Baby egrets

   2. Baby muntjacs

   3. Baby stoats

   4. Baby seals

6. 

   THE BIRDS, PART 1: It is Tippi Hedren's birthday today. Happy birthday Tippi! What is the name of the character she played in the 1963 movie The Birds?

   1. Melanie Daniels

   2. Lydia Brenner

   3. Dodo Chaplet

   4. Annie Hayworth

7. 

   THE BIRDS, PART 2: The 1963 Hitchcock movie starring Tippi Hedren is loosely based on a short horror story about bird attacks in Cornwall published in 1952 and written by who?

   1. John Wyndham

   2. Algernon Blackwood

   3. Daphne du Maurier

   4. Aldous Huxley

8. 

   THE BIRDS, PART 3: Which of these national flags from Europe currently features a bird as part of its design?

   1. Slovenia

   2. Albania

   3. Kosovo

   4. Bosnia and Herzegovina

9. 

   THE BIRDS, PART 4: The Bird-of-Prey class starship belongs to which alien race in the Star Trek universe?

   1. Vulcans

   2. Borg

   3. Klingons

   4. Kardashians

10. 

    IT'S A DOG'S LIFE: This is Willow, the official dog of the Guardian's Thursday quiz. But what is the name of the one-eared rescue dog in Connecticut who has become famous for his paintings?

    1. Picasso

    2. Dali

    3. Van Gogh

    4. Van Klomp

11. 

    FRIENDS OF DOROTHY: Which of the Golden Girls (not pictured) played the character of Dorothy Zbornak in the US hit sitcom?

    1. Beatrice Arthur

    2. Betty White

    3. Rue McClanahan

    4. Estelle Getty

12. 

    OTTAWAN'S DISCO POSER: Ottawan recorded D-I-S-C-O in 1979. But which O is the capital city of Burkina Faso, and the final answer for this alphabetical round for now?

    1. Othrys

    2. Omdurman

    3. Onitsha

    4. Ouagadougou

13. 

    MATHS WITH GOTHS: You thought your copy of the original Sisters of Mercy debut 7" single The Damage Done was worth £400 but somebody told you the value had risen by 7%. Which of these calculations will give you the new value?

    1. 400 x 0.07

    2. 400 x 0.7

    3. 400 x 1.07

    4. 400 x 1.7

14. 

    GCSE SCIENCE CORNER: Potassium reacts vigorously with water forming potassium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. Which of these observations can you expect to make?

    1. The potassium ignites and burns with lilac flame

    2. The potassium sinks to the bottom

    3. The water turns blue

    4. There is a smell of rotten eggs

15. 

    FUNERAL FLASHMOB: Sandie Wood went out in style when, at her own request, her funeral was interrupted by a flashmob dancing to which 1980s hit song?

    1. Going Underground by The Jam

    2. Another One Bites The Dust by Queen

    3. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) by Kate Bush

    4. Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life by Monty Python's Flying Circus

Solutions

1:B - Parisians will be invited to vote on whether to allow electric scooter rental services to continue operating in the French capital as authorities weigh banning the controversial for-hire vehicles, the city’s mayor has said., 2:A - A leaked new agreement drafted by Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns D&D, threatens to “tighten” the open game licence agreement that has been in place since the early 2000s. It would mean companies that make more than $750,000 on D&D-related products would have to start paying Hasbro a 25% cut of their earnings., 3:D - Ed Morales, author of the book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, has defined the word as “a gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”, but within 60 days of Sanders' order, “all state offices, departments, and agencies” will be expected to have revised “all existing written materials by replacing the terms ‘Latinx’, ‘latinx’, ‘Latinxs’, or ‘latinxs’ with ‘Hispanic’, ‘Hispanics’, ‘Latino’, ‘Latinos’, ‘Latina’, or ‘Latinas’”., 4:A - Ring Ring is first in all the options, so nobody can start pedantic arguments about when it was released in which territory or the fact that it was initially released under the credit of Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Frida. You just had to know that it goes Ring Ring (26 March 1973 in Scandinavia), Waterloo (1974 – the year they won Eurovision), ABBA (1975) and Arrival (1976), 5:D - This year’s figure of 3,796 pup births is almost double the count during the winter of 2019-20. Lockdown babies, the lot of them. You can tell by the look on his face that Ron thinks you should have known that, 6:A - Melanie buys the lovebirds and then it all goes horribly wrong, 7:C - Apparently inspired by witnessing a farmer being attacked by a group of gulls while they were ploughing a field, the story first appeared in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, 8:B - The flag of Albania was adopted in 1912 and features a red flag with a silhouetted black double-headed eagle. Complete flag nerds will know that there was a version of the Slovene flag used during the second world war that featured a bird in the coat of arms, but the national flag adopted by Slovenia in 1991 and in use today features an image of Mount Triglav, three stars and two wavy lines, 9:C - The Bird-of-Prey is one of the most common Klingon ships seen. It first appeared in the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and then has featured in five of the films and frequently appears in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine versions of the show, 10:C - The seven-year-old, 70lb boxer mix saved from a dog-fighting ring has been adopted after a highly successful online auction of his “masterpieces”, created by Van Gogh licking peanut butter and liverwurst from a plastic bag and smearing the paint on the canvas below. You can insert your own Damien Hirst/Tracey Emin/Banksy punchline here, 11:A - Bea Arthur played the role of Dorothy Zbornak, a substitute teacher from New York, and the actor was 63 at the time the show premiered, 12:D - With a population of 2.4 million, the city's name is often shortened to Ouaga. And that is the end of the D-I-S-C-O, 13:C - 400 x 0.07 would have given you how much to add to the £400, but the correct value of £428 would be obtained from 400 x 1.07. Incidentally Discogs claims that it sells on average for £539.25 these days, 14:A - Chemistry teachers love showing off those exploding alkali metals, don't they? At GCSE level, students are expected to describe their observations and are marked well for mentioning that the potassium floats, moves around on the surface, melts into a ball, ignites and burns with lilac flame and produces a fizzing/hissing noise, like the hissing noise you are probably making right now if you got this wrong, 15:B - Wood, who died in September, aged 65, was one of 30,000 victims of the contaminated blood scandal. She had requested the stunt as part of a funeral that also included her sparkly high-heeled shoes and handbags being displayed alongside her pink coffin. The words “Going out in style” were written on the coffin. Speaking to the BBC, her friend Sam Ryalls, said: “She wanted everyone to remember her funeral but not for sad reasons. She left the world as she lived it and that was being herself”

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – 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 final, and he will probably ignore your email anyway.