Sample Questions - high school level

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Fine arts
  1. Georges Seurat This French Impressionist, whose trademark is the pointillist technique, is most famous for his painting “Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte”.
  2. Lord Horatio Nelson His statue stands on top of a column in London’s Trafalgar Square.  After he was killed in the Battle of Trafalgar, his body was embalmed in a cask of brandy to be transported home to England for burial. name this vice-admiral.  
  3. Statue of Liberty After designing the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel next designed the iron framework for what New York landmark?
  4. Japan What country is the setting for the opera Madame Butterfly?
  5. Alfred Hitchcock California's Bodega Bay was the setting for the 1963 movie The Birds directed by what Englishman who also directed Psycho?

in the news
  6. Hetch Hetchy Environmentalists want this dam removed to return the river in its namesake valley to a wild state.  But the lake created by the dam provides the water supply to San Francisco and many nearby cities.  Name the valley inside Yosemite National Park and you've named this controversial dam. 
  7. Botulism or botulin toxin More than 90 percent of the people who catch it now survive the respiratory paralysis it causes. You can catch it by eating improperly canned tomatoes.  What bacterial disease had its purified toxin approved by the FDA in 2002 as a cosmetic wrinkle-smoother?  
  8. Donald John Trump Which candidate for president in 2016 was the target of class-action lawsuits by students at his namesake university who claim that the university engaged in false advertising, including saying that this candidate did not hand-pick the professors?
  9. Antonin Scalia His death in 2016 sparked a controversy over his replacement.  Provide the first and last name of this late Supreme Court justice who was a strong voice for conservatism.

Geography
  10. Warsaw The convention that discussed compensation for lost baggage on international airplane travel is named for what capital city of Poland?
  11. Idaho What state contains the Craters of the Moon National Monument?
  12. Savannah What type of tropical grasslands sounds like a city in Georgia?
  13. Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah Name the four US states whose borders meet at Four Corners National Monument

History
  14. Treason According to the Constitution, what crime can a person not be convicted of except by testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or by confession in open court?
  15. Lusitania What British passenger liner was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, which was one of the excuses for the US to enter into World War One?
  16. Spain and Portugal 3. The 1494 Treaty of Tordicellos divided all non-Christian lands between what two Catholic countries?
  17. FDR - Franklin Delano Roosevelt 4. What president was praised as "bringing American into the 20th century" by his last vice-president Harry Truman?

Language, Literature and Mythology
  18. Dog One sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet is "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." In grammatical terms, what word is the direct object in this sentence?
  19. Treasure Island What classic novel begins with the death of the pirate Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow Inn?
  20. Niccolo Machiavelli What Italian diplomat dedicated his book to Lorenzo di Medici and called it The Prince?
  21. Of Mice and Men Lenny Small and George Milton are migrant workers in what Steinbeck novel?
Math
  22. Sir Isaac Newton Whose book, Principia Mathematica, was the first to introduce the concept of integrating equations to find the area under the curve?
  23. 130 miles For a Boy Scout to earn the Cycling merit badge, he must do two 10-mile rides, two 5 mile rides, two 25 mile rides and a 50-mile ride. How many miles in total?
  24. 180 degrees or pi radians What is the sum of the three angles of a triangle?
  25. 4/3 pi cubic centimeters A sphere has surface area 4 pi square centimeters. What is its volume?

Science
  26. Measles, mumps and rubella (also called German measles) In order to attend public school, you need an MMR vaccine. What three disease have vaccines in a single MMR shot?
  27. Alexander Graham Bell What Scottish inventor was living in Ontario Canada when he developed the telephone?
  28. Mu What letter of the Greek alphabet generally denotes the frictional coefficient in physics?
  29. 238 What is the atomic weight of the most common isotope of uranium?

Popular culture (sports, TV, movies, pop music, etc.)
  30. Walter Bruce Willison, stage name Bruce Willis This actor appeared in Pulp Fiction and The Expendables 2 but is best known for his role as John McClane in the Die Hard series. 
  31. Ken What Mattel doll is Barbie’s boyfriend?
  32. 15 When playing standard American pool or billiards, how many balls are racked up?  
  33. Rhythmic The type of Olympic gymnastics done by Mary Lou Retton is called artistic. What is the name of the other type done with a ball, hoop or ribbon, which originated in China?

More sample questions are posted on the Peninsula TV website