Sample Questions

Read a question, click on it to see answer choices, select an answer, and get feedback and an explanation.

Category: Literature in English. Hamlet wanted Ophelia to take up a new habit when he bid her to enter what kind of residence?

University
Nunnery
Work house
Textile mill
Did you get the clue: nuns wear habits.

Category: World Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. What Biblical figure’s one-time city of residence is the root of a common term for sexual perversion?

Sodom
Samson
Job
Lot
Sodomy is the term; Lot left Sodom before God destroyed it.

Category: Fine Arts. What distinguished Medieval archers from swordsmen and is the section that separates orchestras from bands?

Drums
Strings
Blades
Catapults
Bands don’t have a string section.

Category: World Politics. The orbital relationship to the Soviet Union of countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the others included in the 1955 Warsaw Pact can be translated into what word in Russian? The Russian word also describes a vehicle whose sole first passenger was a famous dog.

Glasnost
Sputnik
Perestroika
Laika
Sputnik is the word for satellite, which is what the Warsaw Pact countries were to the USSR; the first canine Sputnik passenger was Laika, a name that means barker.

Category: Business and Economics. Name the fabric that is heavily used in the casual wear industry and gets its name from being indigenous to the garments of farmers around the southern French city of Nimes.

Gabardine
Corduroy
La Meche
Denim
De Nimes means from Nimes

Category: Mythology and Folklore. Who educated and counseled Telemachus while his father, Odysseus, was on his travels? Today the name means a trusted advisor who guides personal development.

Mentor
Consigliori
Eminence Grise
Svengalli

Category: Idioms. What term for dilapidated neighborhoods stems from Seattle loggers using a street named Yesler Way to skid timber into Puget Sound for transportation to the saw mill?

Slum
Skid Row
Ghetto
Seedy Section
During lulls in lumber production, the idle loggers turned to alcohol, and gin mills proliferated around Skid Row, as did destitution and homelessness.

Category: American History. Who was the principal villain in the movie with a title later used as a derisive label for the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative begun by Ronald Reagan, which included defenses in outer space?

Darth Vader
Jabba the Hut
Cyclops
Asteroid Antagonist
Star Wars was the movie; the defense system quickly came under criticism.

Category: American Geography. What is the English translation of the word, Detroit, a city so named because its river is the kind of narrow channel that connects two large bodies of water, Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie?

Strait
Stream
Confluence
Of three

Category: World History Since 1550. Zorro is the Spanish word for an animal associated with what general who committed suicide some years after he had perfected the method of attack known as blitzkrieg warfare?

Rommel
Goering
Goebbels
Montgomery
Zorro is the Spanish word for fox; Erwin Rommel came to be known as the Desert Fox, but was eventually ordered by Hitler to commit suicide, because of his wrongful implication in the plot to assassinate The Fuhrer.