Hemingway’s fish, Pioneer’s planet and Zendaya’s past – take the Thursday quiz

Zendaya arrives on the red carpet at the 2022 TIME100 Gala, but which show did she used to star in? Photograph: John Angelillo/UPI/REX/Shutterstock

The quiz master has been away, but the moment has been prepared for. Trained otters were spotted in the canal by the Guardian’s London office earlier this week, signalling 15 not particularly topical questions in semaphore up at the windows so that you, dear reader, don’t have to go without a quiz, not even for one week. There are no prizes. It is just for fun. Let us know how you get on in the comments, where you can also complain about regular features being missing.

The Thursday quiz, No 71

1. 

   ON THIS DAY: Before heading out into deep space to become very cold and lonely, on 1 September 1979 the space probe Pioneer 11 made its closest approach to which planet?

   1. Saturn

   2. Uranus

   3. Neptune

   4. Pluto

2. 

   LITERATURE: Today also marks the anniversary of the publication of Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a Cuban fisherman and his days-long struggle to land a prize marlin. What is it called?

   1. The Sea, The Sea

   2. The Sun Also Rises

   3. The Sea of Death

   4. The Old Man and the Sea

3. 

   HAPPY BIRTHDAY: It is Zendaya's birthday today. Happy birthday, Zendaya! As well as appearing in Dune and the Spider-Man movies, she was the main star of which Disney Channel sitcom?

   1. Kim Possible

   2. MI High

   3. KC Undercover

   4. High School Musical: The Musical – The Series

4. 

   HAPPY BIRTHDAY (SLIGHT RETURN): Do you know who else has a birthday today? Bruce Foxton. Happy birthday Bruce. But who did he used to play bass guitar for?

   1. The Clash

   2. The Cure

   3. The Police

   4. The Jam

5. 

   SWEET BABY CHEESES: Which one of these options is NOT a variety of cheese produced in Ireland?

   1. Bilberry

   2. Coolea

   3. Knockanore Smoked

   4. Gubbeen

6. 

   GCSE SCIENCE CORNER: The electrolysis of copper sulfate solution makes two products, one at each electrode. The negative electrode gives off copper. What does the positive electrode give off?

   1. Hydrogen

   2. Oxygen

   3. Sulfate

   4. Artron

7. 

   AYES TO THE RIGHT: The Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia. How many senators are there?

   1. 76

   2. 112

   3. 135

   4. About 800 – the same as the number of people able to sit in the House of Lords in the UK

8. 

   1966 AND ALL THAT: A series of questions that aren't about football leading up to the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar, which can't be held at the time of year they actually won the bid for. The 1970 Fifa World Cup was in Mexico. The Mexican national anthem is known by its opening line. What is it?

   1. Fatherland! Fatherland! Your children assure

   2. War, war! On the mountain, in the valley

   3. Mexicans, at the cry of war!

   4. War, huh, yeah, what is it good for?

9. 

   WEIRD WORDS: According to the Collins dictionary online, which of these words is used in botany and zoology to describe something as 'having dartlike spines'?

   1. Flagitious

   2. Jaculiferous

   3. Lucifugous

   4. Struthious

10. 

    TAMMY'S TEASER: Tammy Wynette had a hit single with D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 1968. But which V is a graphic novel by Alan Moore ?

    1. V for Vendetta

    2. The Vampire Diaries

    3. Villains United

    4. Vigilante

11. 

    GREAT FIRE BURNING: How many metres high is the Monument to the Great Fire of London at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill?

    1. 61 metres

    2. 81 metres

    3. 101 metres

    4. 121 metres

12. 

    LITERATURE (AGAIN): Who wrote the 2003 novel The Kite Runner?

    1. Wasef Bakhtari

    2. Kazem Kazemi

    3. Khaled Hosseini

    4. Parween Pazhwak

13. 

    PLEASE JUST WRITE 'QUIZ MASTER' ON THE CUP: Global anti-union bland-coffee chain Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle. When?

    1. 1961

    2. 1971

    3. 1981

    4. 1991

14. 

    THAT'S NOT MY NAME: That was a hit for the Tings Tings (pictured – well one of them anyway). But which legendary showman was born as Erik Weisz?

    1. Charlie Chaplin

    2. P T Barnum

    3. Harry Houdini

    4. Ronald Mael

15. 

    IT'S A DOG'S LIFE: This is Willow, the official dog of the Guardian's Thursday quiz. This is her face after she has just listened to Old Shep, a song about a dog who has 'gone where the good doggies go'. Who famously recorded it in 1956?

    1. Cliff Richard

    2. Elvis Presley

    3. Billy Fury

    4. Kate Bush

Solutions

1:A - It was Jupiter and Saturn that Pioneer 11 visited before heading out into the stars, coming within 20,591km of Saturn, and it nearly bumped into a moon that hadn't previously been discovered and tracked. That picture is actually Pioneer 10, space pedantry fans. Described as 'the little spacecraft that could', scientists last heard from Pioneer 11 in 1995. And it never got to probe Uranus., 2:D - It tells the tale of Santiago trying to fend off sharks after he has exhausted himself spending two days trying to haul in the marlin, and is easily one of the most tedious books the quiz master ever had to study at school. Put me off fishing for life. Not as miserable as Wuthering Heights though, I guess., 3:C - Never off Disney+ in the quiz master's house, KC Undercover saw Zendaya's adventures and scrapes as she worked secretly as a spy for The Organization while also trying to lead a normal teenage life etc etc – kids absolutely love this stuff apparently, and yes 'High School Musical: The Musical – The Series' is an actual title on Disney+., 4:D - Foxton was, along with Paul Weller and Rick Buckler, part of the classic trio line-up of The Jam who had a string of hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s., 5:A - The Bilberry goat is an endangered breed of goat thought to have come over to Ireland with Huguenots from France some 300 years ago. Coolea was developed by Dutch-born Helen Willems in County Cork and is a Gouda-style cheese, Knockanore Smoked is cold-smoked for 10 days using locally-sourced Lismore oak in County Waterford, and Gubbeen is a washed-rind cheese made from cow’s milk and cured with brine. And all of them far superior to anything produced in the US., 6:B - At GCSE level, children are taught that the negative electrode gives off copper and the positive electrode gives off oxygen, so please don't try and explain in the comments where the other stuff goes, or why, because none of us care., 7:A - The size of the Senate has changed since it was first set up. The Australian Constitution originally specified six senators for each state, giving a total of 36 senators, but it has gradually been enlarged over the years. Almost like you can change things., 8:C - It is quite a shouty one about war, written just after Mexico had been forced to cede a large amount of territory to the US. It was first used in the 1850s and then the lyrics currently used were adopted in the 1940s. The lyrics are by poet Francisco González Bocanegra., 9:B - It is jaculiferous. Stuthious sounds like something you imagine a sweary Roman to say in an Asterix comic but it means something resembling ostriches. Lucifugous means 'shunning the light' and flagitious means criminal or villainous., 10:A - Later made into a movie, the comic first started appearing in 1982., 11:A - It is 61 metres high (202 feet) – the exact distance between it and the site in Pudding Lane where the fire began. It was completed in 1677 and in accordance with designer Christopher Wren’s original intentions was initially used for experiments by the Royal Society., 12:C - The book is, of course, about flying kites, which had been banned by the Taliban in Afghanistan, not kites the birds as pictured. But I've deliberately used a picture of the bird to see how many people will complain in the comments about it without having read this bit. , 13:B - Starbucks was named after a character in Moby Dick, and was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl, opening its first store in 1971 near the historic Pike Place Market in Seattle., 14:C - Erik Weisz was born in Budapest in 1874 and made a living doing things that sound, frankly, dangerous and stupid., 15:B - Originally written in the 1930s by Red Foley with lyrics by Arthur Willis about a dog called Hoover that Foley owned as a child, the quiz master still can't even write about it without crying.

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments!

• If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com, but genuinely, it is actually his first day back after a couple of weeks away so he has probably deleted all of his unread email on the basis that if it was that important, people will get back to him. And people quibbling about questions is not high on his list.