Pub Quiz: Everyday Curiosities

Soccer

Greece

Tennis is played on grass, clay, or hard courts, crowned each year by its four Grand Slam tournaments.

The FIFA World Cup brings national association-football teams together in a global tournament first held in Uruguay in 1930.

Soccer

French educator

Major League Baseball

Badminton's shuttlecock can be struck faster than the ball in nearly any other racket sport.

The UEFA Champions League brings together Europe's top clubs, and its final is one of the year's most-watched matches.

Badminton

Olympic sport

National Basketball Association

Table tennis, widely nicknamed ping pong, is played at high speed on a small table.

The Premier League was formed in 1992 and is one of the most widely watched domestic football leagues.

Olympic sport

Squash is played inside a four-walled court, with players striking the ball off the walls to keep it live.

La Liga, Spain's top division, has long been dominated by Real Madrid and Barcelona.

Olympic sport

Racquetball is played in a fully enclosed court using a hollow rubber ball instead of a felt tennis ball.

Serie A, Italy's top division, is historically known for tactical, defense-first football.

Bio is the life root.

Salary comes through French from Latin salarium. Its connection with salt does not prove the popular story that Roman soldiers received…

NASA, established in 1958 amid the early space race, leads US civilian space exploration.

Geology, geography, and geometry all keep a trace of the Greek word for Earth.

The sandwich takes its name from John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.

The FBI, operating under the Department of Justice, serves as the US's primary domestic law enforcement agency.

Chronology arranges events in time, while a chronometer measures it.

Nightmare's mare originally named a mythical demon, unrelated to the animal of the same spelling.

The CIA focuses on foreign intelligence gathering outside US borders, distinct from the domestically focused FBI.

Telephone, telescope, and telegraph all bridge a distance.

Robot entered public use through Karel Čapek's R.U.R., published in 1920. Karel credited his brother Josef with suggesting the word,…

A microphone takes in sound, while a phonograph records it.

Assassin is traditionally traced to an Arabic term linked to the historical Hashashin sect.

Autograph, biography, and photograph each preserve a different kind of record.

Alcohol comes from the Arabic al-kuhl, which originally named a fine cosmetic powder used as eyeliner.

Radar, like laser, evolved from a military acronym into an ordinary everyday word.

Alphabet combines the names of the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta.

Scuba gear freed divers from needing a surface air supply line by making their equipment self-contained.

Zero developed independently across ancient civilizations, with its placeholder role refined in Indian mathematics.

In Euclidean plane geometry, a triangle's interior angles add up to 180 degrees.

The speed of light, about 299,792 kilometers per second in a vacuum, stands as physics' universal speed limit.

Euclid, often called the father of geometry, wrote Elements, one of history's most influential math texts.

Probability measures how likely an event is, expressed as a value between zero and one.

A circle's edge stays perfectly equidistant from its center, with no straight sides or corners.

The metre, the metric base unit of length, is now defined by the distance light travels in a set fraction of a second.

Pythagoras is linked to the right-triangle theorem and led a school that treated numbers as sacred.

The Monty Hall problem shows that switching doors, though counterintuitive, actually improves your odds of winning.

A square, with four equal sides and right angles, counts as a special case of both rectangle and rhombus.

The kilogram, the metric base unit of mass, is now defined using a fixed value of Planck's constant.

Archimedes advanced geometry, physics, and engineering, reportedly inspired while stepping into a bath.

The birthday paradox shows that just 23 people give roughly even odds that two share a birthday.

Euler's number, the base of the natural logarithm, appears throughout calculus and compound growth.

A rectangle's four right angles come with opposite sides that are always equal in length.

The golden ratio, prized for its pleasing proportion, appears in certain natural growth patterns.

A pentagon has five sides and five angles, and also names the US Department of Defense's headquarters building.

A refrigerator uses a refrigeration cycle to move heat from its insulated interior to the surrounding room.

Apple is associated with bitten apple.

The transistor, invented in 1947 to replace bulky vacuum tubes, earned its inventors a Nobel Prize.

TCP/IP, the internet's fundamental protocols, was developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

A heat pump transfers heat rather than creating it directly, and many systems can reverse direction.

Nike is associated with swoosh.

The microprocessor put a full computer processor on one chip, debuting commercially as the Intel 4004.

The Domain Name System translates readable web addresses into numeric IP addresses, often called the internet's phone book.

A thermostat compares measured temperature with a set point and controls equipment to narrow the difference.

Shell is associated with scallop shell.

Python, created by Guido van Rossum, is prized for syntax that reads almost like plain English.

HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol, carries web pages between servers and browsers.

A microwave oven uses electromagnetic waves to transfer energy into food, especially water-rich material.

Target is associated with bullseye.

JavaScript, which powers interactive web pages, was originally created by Brendan Eich in just ten days.

The World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, made the internet's information broadly usable.