Train delays, minor quakes and very naughty dolphins – take the Thursday quiz

These bottlenose dolphins are leaping in the air because they both scored 15/15 last week. Photograph: Minden Pictures/Alamy

The quiz master went to see Pulp at the weekend, and it was a wonderful sun-drenched nostalgic experience meeting up with old friends and old songs. That hasn’t really got anything to do with this week’s quiz, I just thought I’d mention it. Fifteen questions of various degrees of topicality and seriousness await you – including a science question that is actually really genuinely about science for a change. Let us know how you get on in the comments!

The Thursday quiz, No 115

1. 

   LAY OF THE LAND: The Thursday quiz knows that earthquakes are no laughing matter, unless they are in the UK, when they are usually so small as to be hilarious. Which English county experienced a 3.3 magnitude quake last week, centred on the village of Tean? It may have even knocked over some garden furniture or a wheelie bin

   1. Cumbria

   2. Devon

   3. Lincolnshire

   4. Staffordshire

2. 

   BARMY: The world's oldest national printed newspaper is shutting down its print edition after a law change stopped requiring businesses to publish public announcements in it. Which paper?

   1. Austria's Wiener Zeitung

   2. Italy's Gazzetta di Mantova

   3. Germany's Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung

   4. The UK's Fortean Times

3. 

   WINGS: In Ukraine they've unearthed what is left of eight British second world war planes that were sent to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941. What type of planes?

   1. Spitfires

   2. Mosquitoes

   3. Frontios

   4. Hurricanes

4. 

   MAN WHOSE HEAD EXPANDED: The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) concluded that whose column for the Sun about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was discriminatory?

   1. Dan Wooten

   2. Darren Grimes

   3. Jeremy Clarkson

   4. Piers Morgan

5. 

   GET A HOTEL: Talking of complaints, New Zealand’s media watchdog has reprimanded public broadcaster TVNZ after it showed a nature documentary which included dolphins doing the do (not pictured). Roughly how many people complained about the aquatic sex antics being broadcast?

   1. 1

   2. 100

   3. 500

   4. 1,057

6. 

   DOG IS LIFE: Willow, the official dog of the Guardian Thursday quiz, isn't travelling anywhere today. But she knows that last week lots of customers on London's Elizabeth line didn't travel either, because what had wandered on to the tracks?

   1. A deer

   2. A cow

   3. A swan

   4. One very naughty miniature dachshund

7. 

   BOMBAST: Conservative intellectual heavyweight Lee Anderson faces a telling off from UK parliamentary authorities after doing what last week?

   1. Filming a promo spot for his new show on GB News on the parliamentary estate without permission.

   2. Saying nuisance tenants should be made to live “in a tent in the middle of a field” and pick vegetables for 12 hours a day before a cold shower.

   3. Telling the House of Commons that food banks are unnecessary because entire, nutritious meals could be cooked for 30p a time.

   4. Advocating for the return of the death penalty because dead people don’t commit crimes.

   5. Saying that peaceful anti-monarchy protesters should emigrate.

   6. Vowing to boycott watching the England men's football team on television while they continue to take a knee to protest against racism.

   7. Demanding the employment of water cannons to disperse peaceful climate change protests.

   8. Insisting that people on benefits waste money on fags, booze, non-essentials, Sky TV and Virgin Media.

8. 

   WOMEN'S WORLD CUP 2023: Australia is one of the co-hosts for this year's Fifa Women's World Cup, and this is the official mascot in the picture. Clearly not a kangaroo. But are kangaroos herbivores, carnivores or omnivores?

   1. Herbivores

   2. Carnivores

   3. Omnivores

9. 

   WOMEN'S WORLD CUP 2023: Spain will be at the World Cup, too. The country boasts – according to the Guinness World Records anyway – the world's oldest restaurant. It is called Casa Botín. Where is it?

   1. Santiago de Compostela

   2. Seville

   3. Oviedo

   4. Madrid

10. 

    THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE: Element number 11 is sodium which you probably mostly encounter as a constituent of salt. Which of these best describes what happens to the electrons when sodium and chlorine react to form sodium chloride?

    1. The number of electrons sodium has doubles

    2. The chlorine atom loses an electron and the sodium atom gains it

    3. The sodium atom loses an electron and the chlorine atom gains it

    4. 30-50 feral hogs rampage through the atomic structure making a total mess of everything

11. 

    WHY ARE PEOPLE GRUDGEFULL: Which local council voted this week to explore the possibility of a different governance arrangement that might potentially lead to them returning to Nordic rule?

    1. Inishmaan

    2. Orkney

    3. Lindisfarne

    4. Isle of Sheppey

12. 

    NORTH OR SOUTH WITH THE POKÉMON MEOWTH: Which of these cities is the furthest north in France?

    1. Lyon

    2. Nantes

    3. Bordeaux

    4. Toulouse

13. 

    HIT THE NORTH: Ant and Dec are to reboot Byker Grove as a new prime-time series aimed at kids and adults. But what is the new series going to be called?

    1. Byker

    2. The Grove

    3. Byker Grove

    4. This Grove Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us

14. 

    KICKER CONSPIRACY: Leyton Orient are still the champions of League Two in the English Football League, and the quiz master is still literally in this photo. Nigel Travis is one of the directors at Orient. But which sci-fi programme had a villain called Travis?

    1. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

    2. The Tomorrow People

    3. Blake's 7

    4. Space: 1999

15. 

    QUIT IPHONE: Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is launching a new app in a bid to compete with the rapidly falling apart Twitter. What is Meta's new app called?

    1. Bluesky

    2. Sparks

    3. Threads

    4. Twirl

Solutions

1:D - Mark Begg, 30, told the PA Media news agency he was at home in Uttoxeter when he felt “a very large shake”. He said he checked around the house “to see if I could see anything” and “after noticing there were no signs of damage I concluded it was most likely a mini-earthquake”. At least the earth moved for somebody last week., 2:A - In its last daily print edition on Friday, it ran an editorial blaming the government’s new law for the end of its print run and said: “These are stormy times for quality journalism … On more and more platforms, serious content vies for attention with fake news, cat videos and conspiracy theories." They did not mention you get funnier quizzes online though., 3:D - The Hurricanes were part of a package of about 3,000 fighter planes delivered to the USSR between 1941 and 1944 to support the Soviet war effort. They were found stripped of parts and buried in a ravine, presumably so the Soviets could say they were lost and didn't have to pay for them under lend-lease legislation whereby Moscow was required to pay for any donated military equipment that remained intact. , 4:C - Clarkson’s piece, which included references to wanting her paraded naked in public and how he hated her on a “cellular level” attracted more than 25,000 complaints from members of the public when it was published last December. , 5:A - It was probably the same curmudgeon who emails the quiz master every time there is a minor typo in the Ukraine live blog., 6:C - It was a swan. One kind-hearted soul on social media wondered what was wrong with people these days, asking "Has nobody been on the shooing course? How hard is it to move a swan?", 7:A - He has basically done all of those things at one point or another, with the only consequence being promoted to be deputy chairperson of the Tories, which says something about the party we guess. Anyway it is filming a promo for his £100,000-a-year, eight-hour a week job (on top of what you'd think would be the apparently full-time job of being an MP with a salary of £86,584) at GB News that has got him into trouble., 8:A - Further up the evolutionary tree there is evidence that kangaroo ancestors were omnivores, but the modern kangaroo is very specifically adapted to be a herbivore. The Thursday quiz was going to find out what it was and say something nice about the bird that is the mascot, but then the Jonny Bairstow incident happened, so Australia is dead to the quiz., 9:D - It is in the capital, and it was founded in 1725., 10:C - It is an example of ionic bonding. The sodium atom loses an electron to become a positive ion. This electron is then gained by the chlorine atom, which becomes a negative ion. These two ions then form sodium chloride through ionic bonding. And then you put them on your chips. Delicious., 11:B - Councillors voted by a large majority on Tuesday to look at a range of options to increase their autonomy and funding, alleging that Orkney had been unjustifiably deprived of hundreds of millions of pounds by ministers in Edinburgh. Officials have been instructed to look at a range of options. James Stockan, the council’s political leader, stunned many of his colleagues last weekend by asserting that Orkney could align itself to Norway., 12:B - Nantes is about 30 miles (50km) from the Atlantic coast and sits on the Loire as the sixth-largest city in France and the furthest north from this selection., 13:A - As Thursday quiz colleague Robyn Vinter reported, Byker Grove was one of the most popular children’s dramas of its era, and ran for 17 years before it was cancelled in 2006. It remains to be seen whether the new series will acknowledge the bizarre final episode, in which the characters discovered they did not exist and were fictional creations in a television series., 14:C - Played by both Stephen Greif and Brian Croucher, Travis was the eyepatch wearing tool of Jacquline Pearce's unforgettable Servalan, 15:C - Branded by some people who are obviously oblivious to how the word Threads strikes terror into anyone British who watched television in the 1980s, the app is set to launch this week, and will be “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow". The quiz master has already built that in the comment threads under the Thursday quiz.

Scores

1. 0 and above.

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

If you really do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com, but remember the quiz master’s word is final and check out time is 11am.