Travel Quiz

One of the biggest parts of my senior year has been Monday night Tombs Trivia. I'm a big fan of trivia anywhere, spawned by the large database of useless facts I've accrued from years of Wikipedia-surfing, sports page combing, Sporcle-playing and crossword-making. As this would suggest, I'm pretty good, and I've found a group of people led by the indomitable Maggie Lonergan and Arthur Smith, my roommate John Curtin and the mysterious Henry Fingerhut to form a consistent contending team. The trivia is divided into 4 rounds of 10 questions. The first two rounds have some sort of theme that can be very random, ranging from 4 letter words to the month of October. The next round is a music round where a song is played for like four seconds and we have to figure out what the title and artist is.

As such, I'm in trivia mania, and I've composed a quiz based almost exclusively on things I learned while traveling abroad. Here are ten questions that someone who's really followed my blog, and has a lot of useless knowledge, may do pretty well on.

1. Though Chinese is the most spoken first language in the world, the Chinese Wikipedia only has over 200,000 articles, compared to nearly 600,000 for Polish and 473,000 for Portuguese.Although the number of articles does not always correlate too highly with number of speakers, what is arguably the main reason why there are so few Chinese-language Wikipedia pages?

2. What European city did Ronald Reagan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Michael Jackson and Usain Bolt all famously step foot in?

3. I passed by a covered kayak recently. On its covering, someone wrote Athens or Bust, but then crossed off Athens and wrote Qingdao. What did that all mean?

4. What is the least spoken official language of the European Union?

5. What are the four written scripts on a plaque in the entrance to the Forbidden City?

6. Where is Victoria Coach Station? Lake Victoria? Victoria Peak? Greater Victoria?

7. What novel written by an American author about a Polish city won the 1929 Newberry Medal?

8. What city’s main bridge was allegedly started on 1357 / 9 / 7 5:31am and with eggs mixed into the mortar?

9. What letter is strongly associated with a line in the UK and Ireland?

10. What European capital city has a psychological syndrome named after it?

Please post your initial answers or thoughts if you can.