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The quiz, 2012

Scandals, space milk, Mayan doom-mongering, wiff-waff … Test your mental mettle - or at least your powers of recollection - against the best our team of trivia monkeys can muster

VARIOUS

A) The news
B) Adverts
C) Cantonese
D) Jimmy Savile's Jim'll Fix It show

 

2) Which "war criminal" gave a talk on faith and globalisation in Hong Kong in June?

 

 

A) Nothing
B) US$340 million
C) US$3.4 billion
D) More than HSBC had to pay this month to settle a money laundering investigation.

 

A) The Martian Pink diamond
B) A car parking space in Central
C) A pair of Mao Zedong's underpants
D) Naming rights for the proposed new beach at Lung Mei

 

6) What percentage of school-leavers in Asian cities were found to be suffering from short-sightedness in a study published in May?

 

 

A) The US embassy in Beijing publishing data about Chinese air quality
B) US demands for a statue of George Washington to be erected near Tiananmen Square
C) Unflattering comments about Hu Jintao's wife on the Shanghai US consulate's Weibo account
D) US officials drinking Taiwanese beer

 


 
 

10) In October, actor George Clooney (right) failed to appear as a witness at the trial of which alleged sex offender?

 

A) By counting the number of 7-Eleven stores per head of population
B) By looking on Google Earth and the OpenStreetMap website
C) Bribery
D) By measuring acreage of air-conditioned shopping malls

 

A) 87
B) 145
C) 2,569

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A) The Spratlys?
B) The Senkakus?
C) The Paracels?

 

 

A) Mainlanders, mainlanders and more mainlanders
B) Scholarism, the anti-national education protest group
C) Typhoon Saola
D) Container ships' dirty fuel

 

 

 

 

 

A) Moscow, Russia      B) Luanda, Angola         C) Hong Kong       D) Yangon, Myanmar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A) Three houses in Hong Kong, two in Singapore and one in London
B) A room and kitchen in Sham Shui Po and a locker at the swimming baths
C) Thirty-one properties, eight car-parking spaces and two lots under development
D) Half of Kowloon Tong and a castle in Bavaria

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A) Milk obtained from cows reared on the moooo-n
B) A hallucinogenic liquid imbibed by youths in Hong Kong
C) Special purified milk given to Chinese astronauts
D) Mainland "milk powder" with zero milk content

 

 

 

A) A casket of enriched plutonium
B) Two sacks of cocaine
C) Ban Ki-moon's spare hairpiece
D) 100 cartons of space milk

 

 

 

 

 

 

A) A space probe
B) An anal probe
C) The man who designed the Ford Probe

 

A) The underwear bomber
B) The underwire bomber
C) The underwater bomber
D) The under-pressure bomber

 

51) Which of the following is the odd one out?

A) Ai Weiwei and friends
B) Eton schoolboys
C) a group of convicts from the Philippines
D) the Politburo Standing Committee

 

52) What world record title did Guinness bestow upon Chandra Bahadur Dangi (left) this year?

 

A) Dinosaur flatulence
B) Volcanic eruptions
C) CY Leung's illegal trellis
D) Forest fires

 

A)Elephants
B) Locusts
C) Ticks
D) Pandas

 

A) Atheists
B) Cardinals
C) Islamic fundamentalists
D) Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung and his Social Democrats

 

A) 14
B) 140
C) 1,400

 

A) A magical invisible forcefield
B) An enlarged military
C) Human shields
D) Space milk

 

 

 

1) D – well, kind of; the ban covered all foreign programmes, which would include Jim’ll Fix It 
2) Former British PM Tony Blair
3) London Mayor Boris Johnson
4) B
5) A
6) 90 per cent
7) Blind activist Chen Guangcheng
8) A
9) North Korea
10) Italian stallion Silvio Berlusconi
11) B
12) B
13) Fans of Lady Gaga
14) Cyclist Lance Armstrong
15) The first Chinese woman in space
16) The quantum teleportation of photons
17) One: Dennis Wilson
18) Whitney Houston
19) A: The Nansha Islands B: The Diaoyu Islands C: The Xisha Islands
20) The US consulate general, who happened to be out at the time
21) C
22) Jackie “the Chinese people need to be controlled” Chan
23) Meryl Streep, for Iron Lady
24) “Gay”
25) B – yes, Luanda
26) Mitt “Mr America” Romney
27) Apple Inc
28) A severed head, hands and feet
29) Allegra ... not the Concordia
30) The Happy Mondays
31) Artist Jeff Koons
32) The chief executive job
33) C
34) They were all victims of phone hacking by the News of The World
35) Democracy
36) WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
37) Diego Maradona
38) A pathetic 1 per cent
39) Visiting Fukushima, which he didn’t
40) C
41) Six: Australia, Canada, Ceylon, New Zealand, Pakistan; South Africa. 
42) God Save the Queen, by the Sex Pistols
43) B
44) A large, un-issued “The Whole Country is Red” postage stamp
45) 1) Nafissatou Diallo and C) Dominique Strauss-Kahn; 2) Severine and D) James Bond; 3) Paula Broadwell and A) David Petraeus; 4) Rebekah Brooks and B) Rupert Murdoch
46) The moustaches of Movember
47) The fictitious Republic of Wadiya; Aladeen is played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the film The Dictator
48) Wei Wei, former coach of Olympic swimming wunderkind Ye Shiwen
49) A
50) A
51) D – the others have all recorded Gangnam Style YouTube videos
52) The shortest human adult ever recorded
53) A
54) B
55) B
56) A – astonishingly enough 
57) C
58) It’s unlikely, isn’t it?

 

 

There will be no Post Magazine next week. We wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we will return on January 6.

 

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: The quiz, 2012
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