FLQ - The Frontline Quiz

1. During Byzantine rule, this temple was converted into a Christian church. It was later converted into a Catholic one and reverted to Orthodox during the Ottoman Empire, after which it was turned into a mosque. While all the wars and raids it has been witness to over the centuries have taken their toll on the ageing structure, the biggest destruction it faced during its lifespan was during the siege of Athens in the Great Turkish War (1687). The temple, at the time, was used to store X. Name the structure and X.

2. Today it is hailed as a superfood, but in pre-Columbian Andean civilisations, its soapy byproduct, which was obtained after washing and before cooking, was commonly used as a shampoo. What is it?

3. In the 1980s, this brand was marketed under the tagline “You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression”. This is identified as an example of “anxiety marketing”, which the company commonly used to drive sales by inducing fears of the social consequences associated with the condition the product claims to address. What brand is this?

4. The mansion that Cornelius Vanderbilt and his wife Alice built on Fifth Avenue in New York City in the 1870s was the largest single-family home in the city’s history. After many additions, the home was sold to a developer in 1927, who demolished it to make way for new buildings. You can still find remnants of the mansion across New York City: two of its six sculptural reliefs are in the Sherry Netherland hotel, and its entrance hall fireplace (along with various pieces of artwork) is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Where in New York are the mansion’s main gates?

5. While speaking to CNET, Simon Whiteley said that it all came from his wife’s Japanese cookbook. Whiteley scanned the characters from that book and digitally manipulated them until they became the otherworldly code that appeared on screen. “I like to tell everybody that X is made out of Japanese sushi recipes,” said Whiteley. Where can we find X?

6. Historically, buttons were used (by the aristocratic and wealthy) only as decorative embellishments. Then, about 3,000 years after they first came into being, something was invented that suddenly made them useful/functional. What was this invention?

Eurasian golden plover. | Photo Credit: Andrej Chudy/Creative Commons Wikipedia

7. On November 10,1951, Sir Hugh Beaver went on a shooting party in the North Slob by the Slaney river in County Wexford, Ireland. After missing a shot at a Eurasian golden plover, he became involved in an argument over which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the red grouse (the former being correct). Beaver knew there must be numerous other questions debated nightly in pubs throughout Ireland with no way to settle them. What did we get as a result?

8. The first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, was the first work of fiction to mention X being used as an investigative tool and it is the reason one still connects it with detectives today. What is X?

9. Originally, this term referred to all products sold by a certain type of seller, whose name indicated that his book shop was on a fixed spot, usually near a university, and it was permanent, while medieval trading was mainly carried on by itinerant peddlers at markets and fairs. What term am I referring to?

10. The abbreviation of its proper name is FDR. The name we know it by is a misnomer because it is, in fact, bright orange and, these days, is made in the shape of a cylinder. What important investigative object am I talking about?