Random Trivia Quiz
From a renamed fruit to a flight shorter than a coffee break, nothing here follows a theme.
Random trivia with answers, jumping between food, toys, music, travel and record books. There is no single theme, so every question starts fresh and every answer comes with the story behind it.
Did you know?
- LEGO bricks made today still fit bricks made in 1958, because the company keeps its moulds to a tolerance of a few thousandths of a millimetre. Tests have suggested that a single standard 2×2 brick can bear the weight of hundreds of thousands of others stacked on top before it gives way.
- Papa Westray, one end of the famous short flight, has only around 90 residents. The island is also home to the Knap of Howar, a pair of stone farmhouses built about 5,500 years ago and often described as among the oldest standing houses in northern Europe.
- Kiwifruit are berries in the botanical sense, and the plant is a woody vine that can climb more than ten metres. Vines are either male or female, so growers plant a few males among the females to provide pollen, and bees carry it from flower to flower.
Stories behind random facts
Random trivia works because the world is full of small stories hidden inside ordinary things. A fruit, a toy or a short flight can reveal a chapter of history, a quirk of economics or a clever piece of marketing. Jumping between topics also keeps the brain alert, since each question calls on a different kind of knowledge. The sections below look at a few of the stories behind the answers in this quiz, from farming and food names to the business of keeping records.
The fragile banana
Commercial bananas are grown from cuttings rather than seeds, so every Cavendish plant is essentially a genetic copy of the others. That makes farming efficient and gives shoppers a reliable fruit, but it also means a single disease can sweep through whole plantations. The Gros Michel, which dominated exports until the 1950s, was widely described as richer in flavour. Scientists are now breeding and testing new varieties, including disease-resistant ones, to protect the world's supply.
Names made for export
Renaming a product for foreign markets is an old strategy. Besides the kiwifruit, the Patagonian toothfish became far more popular after it was sold as Chilean sea bass, and a deep-sea fish once called slimehead is now known as orange roughy. Such names make unfamiliar foods sound appealing to shoppers, although food regulators in many countries now control which names may appear on labels, to avoid misleading buyers about what they are eating.
Keeping track of records
Record keeping is harder than it looks. Guinness World Records employs adjudicators who travel to verify attempts, and categories must be measurable, breakable and comparable. Some categories have been closed because they encouraged harmful behaviour, such as overfeeding pets to make them as heavy as possible. The book itself became one of the best-selling copyrighted titles in history, and new editions are published every year in dozens of languages, alongside a website and television specials.