Skip to main content

Quick Christmas Quiz

It's that time of year when no one can be bothered to do any real work. So here's a few little Christmas challenges for you. Answers down the bottom.

1. Which well-known Christmas song is almost always performed as just the chorus without the less familiar first verse starting like this:



2. Just mixing up my imp nieces? What Christmas delicacy am I cooking?

3. The Twelve days of Christmas song has 11 what?

4. Which Christmassy Poirot story by Agatha Christie is set in the fourteenth century manor house Kings Lacey (bizarrely made a 1920s building in the TV version)?

5. Ilex and Hedera. Not two rejected reindeer but...?

No Googling, please - all your own work.

While you get your answers together, the ad break...

/
/
/
/

If you enjoy a little mental quizzing, there's only one book to get your hands on this Christmas:


/
/
/
/

And here come the answers:

1. White Christmas
2. Mince pies
3. Pipers piping
4. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
5. Holly and Ivy

Comments

  1. Roger Witney23 December 2015 at 17:30

    No. 1 sounds vaguely familiar...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yahoo contact number26 December 2015 at 07:07

    Very nice and interesting blog post! Your blog brings me great deal of fun..Keep sharing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more