Trivia Quiz

In the rhyme's second verse, Jack runs home to mend his cracked crown with "vinegar and brown paper" — an old folk remedy.

T. E. Lawrence earned the name leading Arab fighters against the Ottoman Empire in World War I; he told the story in his memoir "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

The bushy whiskers flare at the jaw like the cut of meat — and the word "sideburns" itself is a flipped tribute to Civil War general Ambrose Burnside, famous for his face fuzz.

An altimeter reads height above sea level from changes in air pressure — vital in a cockpit, useless on the road.

The soaring title song from the 1980 movie "Fame" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

A former communications chief for President Clinton, Stephanopoulos took over ABC's "This Week" in 2002 and has co-anchored "Good Morning America" since 2009.

The Rockets made the 7-foot-6 Yao the first overall pick of the 2002 NBA Draft; he became an eight-time All-Star and a Hall of Famer.

At the first-ever hard rock/metal Grammy in 1989, the flute-driven Jethro Tull beat the heavy favorite Metallica — an upset so infamous the category was reworked the next year.

While running for president in 1968, Nixon popped up on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" to deliver the show's catchphrase, "Sock it to me?"

Anne wrote in Dutch; her father Otto had the diary published in the Netherlands in 1947 as "Het Achterhuis" ("The Secret Annex").

That average gap — about 150 million kilometers — is defined as one "astronomical unit," the basic yardstick for distances across the solar system.

Every official Major League ball is hand-stitched with 108 double stitches at a Rawlings plant in Turrialba, Costa Rica.

The line is spoken by the watchman Marcellus in "Hamlet," not by the prince himself — a detail that fools almost everyone.

In 1947, engineers traced a glitch in Harvard's Mark II computer to a moth stuck in a relay; they taped it into the logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found."

The motto "In God We Trust" first appeared on the two-cent piece in 1864, during the Civil War.

Simms was the first athlete in the long-running "I'm going to Disney World!" ad campaign, filmed right after the New York Giants won Super Bowl XXI in 1987.

Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout his writing life, once joking that medicine was his "lawful wife" and literature his "mistress."

Under the old Julian calendar the English year began on March 25, "Lady Day"; the 1752 switch to the Gregorian calendar moved New Year's to January 1.

Einstein, Bohr, and Fermi each have an element — einsteinium, bohrium, fermium — but Newton, for all his fame, has none.

Lesotho is one of only three nations completely surrounded by a single other country; the other two are San Marino and Vatican City, both ringed by Italy.

Paddington stowed away to London from "darkest Peru," which is why his tag reads "Please look after this bear" — and why he adores marmalade.

She renamed herself Anne as a child and went on to write "Interview with the Vampire" and the rest of the Vampire Chronicles.

Sony first sold it in the U.S. as the "Soundabout" and in Britain as the "Stowaway" before the catchier "Walkman" name took over worldwide.

The secret bunker under West Virginia's Greenbrier resort was built to shelter Congress during a nuclear attack; it stayed classified until a 1992 newspaper exposed it.

The plant honors Joel Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who shipped cuttings home in the 1820s.

As a boy in Canada, Jennings hosted a children's radio program long before he anchored ABC's "World News Tonight."

Le Duc Tho shared the 1973 prize with Henry Kissinger for the Vietnam ceasefire but turned it down, saying real peace had not yet come.

It's named for the French writer Stendhal, who described feeling faint and dizzy after taking in the art of Florence in 1817.

Sikorsky flew his VS-300 in 1939 and built the first mass-produced helicopter, the R-4; he had earlier pioneered big multi-engine planes and flying boats.

"N" is the international nationality mark assigned to the United States, so every U.S. civil aircraft's tail number begins with it.

The show never explained what became of Carol's first husband; a later episode quietly gives her maiden name as Tyler.

The Islamic (Hijri) calendar is purely lunar — twelve months of 29 or 30 days, about 354 in all — so its dates slide about 11 days earlier each year.

On Apollo 14 in 1971, Shepard fixed a six-iron head to a sample-collecting tool and one-handed two golf balls across the lunar surface.

Shaw won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature and a 1938 Oscar for the screenplay of "Pygmalion" — the only person to claim both.

Before he wrote his landmark baby-care book, Spock rowed in the U.S. eight that took gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics.

The first aerosol "bug bombs" were developed in World War II to shield U.S. troops in the Pacific from insect-borne disease.

Meatpacker Sam Wilson stamped "U.S." on Army beef barrels in the War of 1812; soldiers joked it stood for "Uncle Sam," and the nickname stuck.

Johnson loved the diet citrus soda Fresca so much that he had a fountain dispensing it put into the Oval Office.

Grant Wood posed his own dentist, Byron McKeeby, as the pitchfork-holding farmer, and his sister Nan as the woman beside him.

Irving Berlin wrote it for his 1918 Army revue "Yip Yip Yaphank" but cut it; he revived it in 1938 for singer Kate Smith, who made it a standard.

"Tabby" comes from al-Attabiya, a district of Baghdad known for a striped silk — a pattern the cat's coat seemed to share.

Colonists dumped tea from three ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver; there was no ship called the William.

The 1960 shoe-banging episode at the U.N. came after a delegate from the Philippines accused the Soviet Union of swallowing up Eastern Europe.

Edith Bolling Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's second wife, traced her ancestry back nine generations to Pocahontas; she wielded great influence after his stroke.

Bacon is said to have caught a fatal chill in 1626 while stuffing a hen with snow to test whether cold could preserve meat — an early stab at refrigeration.

Demographers at the Population Reference Bureau estimate that more than 100 billion people have ever been born — making the living a small slice of all humanity.

Before Lincoln's two-minute address, the celebrated orator Edward Everett spoke for about two hours; Everett later admitted Lincoln had said more in two minutes than he had in two.

Leonardo painted it on a convent dining-hall wall in Milan; monks later cut a doorway through the bottom, lopping off Jesus's feet.

The remark "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work" — made by Winston Churchill — is itself now an entry in Bartlett's.

The "M*A*S*H" finale on February 28, 1983 drew roughly 106 million U.S. viewers, still the most-watched scripted episode ever; CBS aired it after the sitcom "Alice."

"Nephelococcygia" means spotting shapes in clouds; the word nods to "Cloud-cuckoo-land" from Aristophanes' comedy "The Birds."

In 1835 a man pointed two pistols at Jackson at point-blank range and both misfired — the first assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. president.

The Blorenge, a hill above Abergavenny in Wales, is one of the very few words that almost rhyme with "orange."

His 1555 "Traite des fardements et confitures" was a down-to-earth guide to cosmetics and fruit preserves — jams and jellies.

Franklin's 1737 "Drinker's Dictionary" rounded up more than 200 colorful terms for being drunk, from "nimptopsical" to "cherry-merry" — but not "pifflicated."

Yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium are all named after Ytterby, a tiny village near Stockholm whose mine yielded their ores — the most elements named for one place.

A famous demonstration found that a bowl of lime Jell-O wired to an EEG traced wiggles like a living brain's — the machine was actually picking up electrical noise from the room.

The "Tiger King" really did put out songs such as "I Saw a Tiger" and "Here Kitty Kitty" — though it later came out that the vocals weren't his own.

The Harrisons had electric lighting installed in 1891 but were so wary of a shock that they often left the switches for the staff to flip.

A "zax" is a tool for cutting and punching nail holes in roofing slate; worth 19 points, it's a Scrabble windfall for such a short word.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was queen of France and then of England; with Henry II she was mother to two future kings, Richard the Lionheart and John.

"Quercus robur" is the botanical name of the English, or pedunculate, oak.

The volt honors Alessandro Volta, the Italian count who built the first true battery — the "voltaic pile" — around 1800.

America's Triple Crown is the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes; the Arlington Million is a separate race entirely.

Two strapping men struck the giant gong in the Rank Organisation's film logo; the boxer Bombardier Billy Wells was the best-known "gongman."

With roughly eight million native speakers, Austria — where German is the official language — edges out Switzerland for the most outside Germany.

Pakistan's express-paced bowler Shoaib Akhtar earned the nickname for his hometown, Rawalpindi; he was clocked among the first to bowl 100 mph.

Denmark held the Nicobar Islands on and off for over a century before selling its claim to Britain in 1868; Danes had also run the Indian trading post of Tranquebar.

In his 1604 work on optics, Kepler showed the eye's lens casts an upside-down image onto the retina — explaining where sight actually begins.

Gallium melts in your hand at about 30°C but is solid at room temperature, and bromine is a liquid nonmetal; only mercury stays liquid, freezing near -39°C.

Counting its overseas territories, from French Polynesia to Wallis and Futuna, France spans 12 time zones — one more than Russia's 11.

Ford was appointed vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned, then became president in 1974 when Nixon resigned — the only person to hold both offices without winning a national election for either.