The Great Significance Christmas Quiz! Part 1! - Festive fun for all the family!

Author: Father Christmas

Christmas is almost here – and to occupy your last week at work before it comes here is the first instalment of our Significance Great Christmas Quiz. Altogether there will be 75 questions. The first 25 are here, the rest will follow tomorrow and on Wednesday. All the questions (except one*) are based on postings that have appeared on this website since it opened, just over a year ago - which means they will have some connection, even if tenuous, with statistics.

Try my special Significance

quiz, Ho! Ho! Ho!, - and Happy Christmas!

If you have read us regularly you might know a fair number of the answers; all the rest (bar that one) can be found by diligently searching the site. (Hint: If the search engine does not give what you want, try clicking on the headings on the right for a list of all postings on those topics.) And there are prizes, kindly donated by our publishers Wiley, who support this site.

Give your answers as a numbered list – send in all 75, with your answer next to the question number. No answer needs more than six words, but longer ones will not be penalised. The answers we want are those that have been given in postings on the site – if, for example, updated figures have been issued since then, those are NOT what we are looking for. An answer will be accepted if it shows that you have clearly identified the reference concerned.

First all-correct answer pulled out of hat will receive Wiley books to the value of £50; second and third to the value of £30 and £25. If no all-correct answers are received prizes will be awarded to the highest scorers. The editor’s decision is final.

Please e-mail your answers, as a Word attachment, to SignificanceQuiz@rss.org.uk.  Please put your name and e-mail address on your attachment also!  Closing date is January 6^th, and the answers will be given soon after. 

Happy Christmas from the Significance team - and enjoy visiting or revisiting some of your and our favourite postings! 

(*which is not in this instalment, and is easily solved. Just think of it as an extra Christmas treat. )

The Great Significance Christmas Quiz – Part 1

The Natural World:

1. Why would it be useful to know how many times a day an elephant relieves itself?

2. Roughly how many snowflakes fall every year?

How many snowflakes?

3. How many people, on average, get eaten by sharks each year?

4. According to the Heath and Safety Executive, 24 scuba dives, 100 canoeing trips or one pregnancy share what risk in common?

5. Counting which three fish helps teach people to count people?

Great and/or Famous statisticians:

6. Which Royal Statistical Society (RSS) president has a pie named after him?

7. Which first-ever foreign member of the American Statistical Association has a pie chart named after her?

8. This photograph was taken by Frank Hurley on Shackleton’s polar expedition of 1914-16 at the launch of probably the most arduous and daring small-boat voyage in history. Which part of the picture could be mistaken for a President of the RSS?

9. Which famous statistician wrote a scientific paper entitled ‘Arithmetic by Smell’?

10. Which statistician, who died this year, saved millions of lives with an estimator?

Gladstone - or, with hat

and beard, Father Christmas?

World Leaders:

11. Which leader of his nation and lover of statistics, who died this year, was known as ‘the good’?

12. William Ewart Gladstone (pictured) was Prime Minister of the UK, and also President of the Royal Statistical Society. Which other Prime Minister was also a President of the RSS?

13. Which leader of his nation can be distinguished by his intelligence from a machine in a box?

14. Which leader of his nation said ‘One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic’?

15. Which leader of his nation wants to know how happy it is?

War:

16. Which battle of the Second World War cost most lives?

17. In the winter before D-day, the British wartime authorities took a census of what?

18. When Harold got one in the eye, what is the difference between the maximum and minimum estimates of the number who fought on his side?

19. What, according to an article in Nature this year, causes (or at least correlates with) a doubling of risk of wars in the Eastern Pacific?

20. Which great writer, statistician, and national hero, who died this year, undertook a ‘descent into Hell’ to establish the number of los desaparecidos – ‘the disappeared’?

Taxes:

21. The average pay of a Goldman Sachs employee in the UK, before tax (and before bonuses) is £270,000, which works out at £5,200 a week. What is the average weekly pay of a full-time employed person in the UK who does NOT work for Goldman Sachs?

22. What major event marked the only time when the price of petrol in the UK was as high in real terms as it is now?

23. How much money (in October) did the average American owe as his share of the US national deficit?

24. Greek national debt statistics have been ‘unreliable’ for decades, and have almost brought down the Euro. Whose law might have spotted this earlier?

25. When a boy was found wandering in a forest this year, having apparently been raised by wild animals, what did Germany do to Switzerland?

More questions tomorrow and Wednesday! Tomorrow's topics: Health, Science, Entertainment, Sport... and more!