Censored art and naughty pigs – take the Thursday quiz

Unlucky for some, incredibly it is the 13th edition of the quiz idea so haphazard that you feel it must have been scribbled down on the back of a cigarette packet in the pub, if only pubs had been open earlier in the year. Fifteen questions. Some of them are topical. Some of them are general knowledge. One will have anagrams and one will feature Kate Bush, and most of them are a tiny bit silly in some way. It’s just for fun; let us know how you get on in the comments.

The Thursday quiz, No 13

1. UK NEWS: Ocado’s share price sunk to its lowest level in more than a year after it was forced to cancel thousands of orders because of…

   1. A shortage of workers due to them self-isolating because of being "pinged" by the NHS app

   2. A collision between some robots that started a fire

   3. A computer error meant that drivers were being sent to the wrong addresses by their Sat Navs

   4. A national hummus and quinoa shortage meaning they couldn't fulfil any of their orders from Guardian readers

2. THE BRITISH WEATHER: The Met Office issued its first extreme heat warning for the UK as part of a new alert service. What level was the warning?

   1. Amber

   2. Bronze

   3. Red

   4. Level two

3. MUSIC: Hip-hop artist Biz Markie died recently, aged 57. He was at the centre of a landmark legal case when he used an unauthorised 20-second sample from an unlikely source on a record in 1991, and became the first person to be successfully sued for it. Which artist sued him?

   1. Leo Sayer

   2. Gilbert O’Sullivan

   3. Engelbert Humperdinck

   4. Kate Bush

4. SPORT: Tokyo 2020 is due to get under way properly tomorrow. Which four cities are due to be hosts of the next four winter and summer Olympics and Paralympics?

   1. Beijing, Madrid, Milano-Cortina, Los Angeles

   2. Beijing, Paris, Stockholm, Los Angeles

   3. Beijing, Paris, Stockholm, Brisbane

   4. Beijing, Paris, Milano-Cortina, Los Angeles

5. RETURN ON INVESTMENT: Talking of the Olympics, this week, one of the Games' most high-profile "Worldwide Olympic Partners™" said they wouldn't be doing any Olympic-related advertising in Japan, as hosting the event was proving so unpopular. Which one?

   1. Toyota

   2. Coca-Cola

   3. Nintendo

   4. Samsung

6. COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING: Which of these indie legends usually associated with Manchester is the oldest? Shaun Ryder, Ian Brown, Johnny Marr or Bernard Sumner?

   1. Shaun Ryder

   2. Ian Brown

   3. Johnny Marr

   4. Bernard Sumner

7. GEOGRAPHY: This is the flag of the Crown Colony of Sarawak, which existed from 1946 to 1963. It is now part of which south-east Asian country? Plot twist – it is anagram time.

   1. Nil Hip Peps I?

   2. Insane Do I?

   3. Alas May I?

   4. A Lad Nth I?

8. IT'S PHILATELY GONE MAD: The world’s rarest stamp is returning to Britain permanently for the first time in 143 years. The stamp dealer Stanley Gibbons says it is thought to be – "gram for gram" – the most valuable manufactured item in the world, about 2.5 million times more valuable than…

   1. Gold

   2. The Koh-i-Noor diamond

   3. The Mona Lisa

   4. Trying to rent anywhere in London

9. ON THIS DAY: Mariner 1 was one of Nasa's earliest attempts to flyby a planet. It launched on 22 July 1962 but the mission lasted only 294 seconds after the launch had to be aborted when it veered off course. What planet had Mariner 1 been aiming for?

   1. Mercury

   2. Venus

   3. Mars

   4. Mondas

10. ART FOR ART'S SAKE: A council in Essex insisted on the removal of an artwork by Gabriella Hirst called An English Garden because it referred to what?

    1. Britain's early role in promoting the trans-Atlantic slave trade

    2. The Black Lives Matter movement

    3. Britain's role in the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947

    4. Britain's nuclear tests in Australia

11. FLAGS: Everybody knows that the Welsh flag is one of the best in the world. It's got a dragon on it, so who is going to argue with that? But whose dragon is it traditionally held to be?

    1. Cadwaladr, King of Gwynedd

    2. Edward I

    3. Saint David

    4. Iolo Morganwg

12. TRUE OR FALSE: Named after Gustav Ludwig Hertz, the hertz is the derived unit of magnetic flux in the International System of Units

    1. True

    2. False

13. HORSELESS CARRIAGES: In 1894 the "Concours du Petit Journal Les Voitures sans Chevaux" took place, which is often regarded as the world's first competitive motor race. Contestants had to travel between which two French cities?

    1. Paris and Rouen

    2. Paris and Roubaix

    3. Paris and Nice

    4. Paris and Le Havre

14. MAKING BACON: Talking of cars and their carbon emissions, the climate impact of wild pigs around the world is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of how many cars annually, according to new research?

    1. 30-50

    2. 250,000

    3. 1.1 million

    4. 4 million

15. AND FINALLY: While on the subject of feral hogs, parents in the US are complaining that watching Peppa Pig is doing what to their kids?

    1. Giving them British accents

    2. Turning them into vegetarians

    3. Making them splash in muddy puddles

    4. Making them question why Miss Rabbit appears to have about 1,057 jobs and all of them give her paid holidays, unionised workers' rights and healthcare cover.

Solutions

1:B - Ocado uses vast warehouses with robots criss-crossing a giant chessboard-style grid layout to sort its orders, rather than relying on human pickers. However, three robots crashed on Friday, causing the fire. Reports that they had become sentient and had done it on purpose to get the weekend off in the sunshine remain unconfirmed., 2:A - An amber warning is the second-highest level under the Met Office’s extreme heat warning service, launched in June. It said temperatures in most areas covered by the warning would be in the high 20s and low 30s. A note accompanying the alert warned of health effects on vulnerable people as well as heat exhaustion and sunburn for the wider population., 3:B - Biz Markie's third album, I Need a Haircut, was withdrawn after Gilbert O’Sullivan launched a lawsuit against him for using a sample from his 1972 hit Alone Again (Naturally) on the track Alone Again. O’Sullivan’s suit was upheld in the ruling Grand Upright Music Ltd v Warner Bros Records, and Markie was ordered to pay $250,000 in damages. The decision sent a seismic shock through the hip-hop world and beyond, since henceforth all samples would have to be legally cleared with the original artists, and duly paid for., 4:D - Correct. Beijing will become the first city to have hosted both the summer and winter Olympics, Paris and Los Angeles will both be hosting the summer Olympics for the third time each., 5:A - Toyota’s chief executive and other senior executives will also not attend Friday’s opening ceremony in a further blow to the delayed and troubled Olympics., 6:D - It's Barney. You've got to remember that he was in Joy Division before New Order, and both of those bands pre-date Johnny Marr's The Smiths, who came several years before Happy Mondays and Stone Roses. They are all getting on a bit now, mind you, although not all of them have gone cranky about face masks, eh Ian?, 7:C - Yes. It was located on the island of Borneo, and was administered as such from the end of the second world war until it became part of Malaysia in 1963. Your other options where the Phillipines (Nil Hip Peps I?), Indonesia (Insane Do I?), and Thailand (A Lad Nth I?)., 8:A - To be honest, they would say this, wouldn't they? I mean, it's just a stamp…, 9:B - The plan had been for a suite of experiments to determine the temperature of Venus as well as measure magnetic fields and charged particles near the planet and in interplanetary space. I would have thought it would have made more sense to send Mariner to Mars, but what do I know?, 10:D - The artwork was intended to highlight the assembly, at a site nearby, of Britain’s first atomic bomb and the devastation caused by its detonation on unceded Indigenous land in Australia. The council told the artists that it was “a direct far-leftwing attack on our history, our people and our democratically elected government"., 11:A - There's not thought to be a firm established historical link but use of the dragon as an emblem for Wales was common for centuries after Cadwaladr's death. The Tudors claimed descent from Cadwaladr to legitimise their authority over Britain as a whole and accordingly used the red dragon on their banners. Saint David's symbol was the leek. Iolo Morganwg was a historian of Wales, and Edward I was very much not Welsh, although he did invade the country., 12:B - Hertz was the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves, and so the derived unit of frequency is named after him. One hertz is defined as one cycle per second., 13:A - Entry cost 10 francs and cars had to be "not dangerous, easy to drive, and cheap during the journey". The car that finished first was deemed ineligible for the prize because it was steam-powered and required someone to operate the boiler. It is so weird the way they called them horseless carriages, he said using the wireless internet on his cordless telephone., 14:C - It's not actually the pigs per se but they dig up ground, so exposing microbes that then emit carbon dioxide, adding some 4.9 million metric tonnes of the stuff into the atmosphere each year. Naughty pigs. The 30-50 option is there as the phrase "30-50 feral hogs" went viral after a hypothetical argument made on Twitter defending the ownership of assault rifles, which suggested that such weaponry would be necessary to combat the "30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play"., 15:A - Peppa Pig was the second most in-demand cartoon in US households and some parents appear to be insisting, with precious little evidence, that the “Peppa effect” has their American children saying “mummy” instead of “mommy”, using phrases such as “Give it a go”, and correctly pronouncing tomato “to-mah-to” rather than “to-may-to”.

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   Do let us know how you get on in the comments!

2. 7 and above.

   Do let us know how you get 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 remember, the quizmaster’s word is always final and he hates to be disturbed.