The eleven days Britain deleted

Ten questions, easy to hard. Guess, then drop your eye to the box.

1. Which planet has the most known moons?

Saturn. Its count passed 270 in 2025, well ahead of Jupiter.

2. What is the capital of Australia?

Canberra. Chosen in 1908 because Sydney and Melbourne each refused to let the other have it.

3. How many bones are in an adult human body?

206. Babies are born with about 300, and many fuse together as they grow.

4. Which philosopher was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock?

Socrates. Athens convicted him in 399 BC of corrupting the young.

5. What is the largest desert on Earth?

Antarctica. A desert is defined by how little falls from the sky, not by heat.

6. What is the hardest substance found in nature?

Diamond. A 10 on the Mohs scale, and only another diamond can scratch it.

7. Counting overseas territories, which country spans the most time zones?

France. Twelve, from French Polynesia to New Caledonia. Russia has eleven.

8. In what year was Magna Carta sealed at Runnymede?

1215. King John asked the Pope to cancel it within ten weeks, and the Pope agreed.

9. Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the air you breathe?

Nitrogen. Oxygen is about 21 percent, and argon takes most of the rest.

10. Who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776?

Adam Smith. The phrase invisible hand appears in the book exactly once.

On this night in 1752, people across Britain and its American colonies went to bed on Wednesday, September 2 and woke on Thursday, September 14. Parliament had adopted the Gregorian calendar 170 years after Catholic Europe, and the only way to catch up was to delete eleven days. The tale of mobs shouting for their eleven days back traces mostly to a Hogarth painting, and historians have found little evidence of it.

1. Which pope introduced the calendar Britain finally adopted?

Gregory XIII, in 1582. Spain, Portugal, and Italy switched that October and skipped ten days.

2. Why did Britain need eleven days instead of ten?

The drift had grown by another day since 1582. The Julian year runs about eleven minutes long, which costs a day every 128 years.

3. Which European country switched last?

Greece, in 1923. Russia changed in 1918, which is why the October Revolution is marked in November.

An octopus has three hearts. Two pump blood through the gills and the third pushes it around the body, and that third heart stops whenever the animal swims, which is one reason an octopus would rather crawl. Its blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper rather than the iron in ours, and copper works better in cold water.

1. What is the copper-based molecule in its blood called?

Hemocyanin. Lobsters and horseshoe crabs run on it too.

2. How many of an octopus's neurons sit in its arms?

About two thirds. Each arm can taste, touch, and make simple decisions on its own.

3. How long does a giant Pacific octopus live?

Three to five years. The female stops eating once she lays her eggs and dies soon after they hatch.

Only two countries are doubly landlocked, meaning every neighbor is landlocked too, so you must cross at least two borders to reach saltwater. One is Liechtenstein, between Switzerland and Austria. The other is Uzbekistan, ringed by five landlocked neighbors.

1. Which country has the most neighbors?

China, with fourteen. Russia also touches fourteen if the disputed ones are counted.

2. What is the deepest lake on Earth?

Lake Baikal in Siberia. Over a mile deep, holding about a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water.

3. Which African capital sits highest above sea level?

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Around 7,700 feet, high enough that visitors feel the thin air.

The shark in Jaws broke down so often in salt water that Steven Spielberg had to shoot around it, using a floating barrel and John Williams's two-note theme in place of the animal. The fish appears for roughly four minutes in a two-hour film, and the failure made the picture scarier than a working prop would have.

1. What did the crew nickname the mechanical shark?

Bruce. After Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer.

2. How many notes are in the Jaws theme?

Two. E and F, played low on the strings and sped up as the shark closes in.

3. What did the film invent when it opened in 1975?

The summer blockbuster. Wide release plus national TV ads, a pattern every studio copied.

Beethoven kept composing after he went deaf, sawing the legs off his piano so he could feel the vibrations through the floor. At the first performance of his Ninth Symphony in 1824 he stood facing the orchestra, still conducting after the music had stopped, until a singer turned him around to see the audience applauding.

1. Roughly how old was he when he first noticed hearing loss?

About 26. He described a ringing in his ears and hid it from friends for years.

2. Which tune from the Ninth is now the anthem of Europe?

The Ode to Joy. Adopted by the Council of Europe in 1972, with no words.

Honey does not spoil. Archaeologists opened pots in Egyptian tombs sealed more than 3,000 years ago and found the honey still edible, because it holds almost no water and is acidic enough that bacteria cannot grow in it. Bees fan the nectar down to about 18 percent moisture before capping the comb.

1. How much honey does one worker bee make in her life?

About a twelfth of a teaspoon. A pound of honey takes roughly two million flower visits.

2. Which spice is the most expensive by weight?

Saffron. Each thread is a hand-picked stigma, and a pound takes about 75,000 flowers.

The Mona Lisa was not the most famous painting in the world until somebody stole it. On the morning of August 21, 1911, a Louvre handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia lifted it off the wall and walked out with it under his smock. The empty space drew bigger crowds than the picture ever had, Picasso was questioned as a suspect, and the painting sat in a trunk for two years.

1. Where was it recovered?

Florence, in December 1913. Peruggia tried to sell it to a dealer, claiming he was returning it to Italy.

2. Who commissioned the portrait, and did he ever get it?

A silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, and no. Leonardo carried it to France and kept it until he died.

The United States struck its last penny in November 2025. Each one cost about 3.7 cents to make, so the Mint lost money on every coin, while roughly 250 billion of them already sat in jars and drawers. Canada dropped its penny in 2012, and cash prices there now round to the nearest five cents.

1. What is a modern penny mostly made of?

Zinc. About 97.5 percent, under a thin copper plating. Pennies before 1982 were mostly copper.

2. Which US coin now loses the Mint the most per unit?

The nickel. Around 14 cents to produce a coin worth five.

Quiz first showed up in print in the 1780s meaning an odd or eccentric person, and only later came to mean a test of knowledge. A well-loved story says a Dublin theater manager named Daly bet he could invent a word overnight, chalked QUIZ on walls across the city, and won when the town spent the next day asking what it meant. The tale appears decades after the word was already in use, so enjoy it as a yarn.

1. What does trivium mean in Latin?

A place where three roads meet. Medieval universities taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric first and called them the trivium. Trivia comes straight out of it.

2. Where does the word salary come from?

Sal, the Latin for salt. Roman soldiers received a salt allowance called a salarium.