Ahead of the grand final of the brain-squeezing series next Monday, test your mental mettle with 15 questions set by the show’s quizmasters
The opening scene of which of Shakespeare’s plays comprises just 61 words, the longest of those words being “lightning”, “hurlyburly” and “graymalkin”?
Macbeth
Twelfth Night
Timon of Athens
Comedy of Errors
What term for a type of particle accelerator also applies to a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles spiralling in magnetic fields?
Cyclotron
Gamma
Synchrotron
Collider
The works of which Italian artist, born in 1449, include St Jerome in His Study and the frescoes for the Sassetti chapel in Florence? His numerous apprentices included Michelangelo.
Fra Angelico
Domenico Ghirlandaio
Leonardo Da Vinci
Sandro Botticelli
For which film set in Rome did Paolo Sorrentino win the 2014 Academy Award for best foreign language film?
Life Is Beautiful
The Great Beauty
Parasite
The Postman
What bird does the British Trust for Ornithology describe as: “By far the biggest passerine, with a similar wingspan to a buzzard. The bill is strikingly long and heavy”?
Long-tailed tit
Rook
Raven
Tawny owl
In March 1969, the Ussuri River was the scene of armed clashes between which two major powers?
China and the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union and the US
China and the US
The UK and Argentina
In April 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo over which body of water, crossed earlier by Louis Blériot?
The Channel
Atlantic Ocean
Black Sea
Lake Superior
Described as “the little town keeping the lights on in France”, Arlit in Niger was until 2021 the site of one of the world’s largest mines of which toxic metal?
Bismuth
Mercury
Lead
Uranium
What colour links the field of the flag of the Basque country, William Morris’s house in Bexleyheath and leading football clubs in Belgrade and Salzburg?
Red
Green
Purple
Blue
Who wrote the Nebula-award-winning novels Doomsday Book and All Clear?
George R R Martin
Neil Gaiman
Connie Willis
Ursula Le Guin
Nenagh, Clonmel and Cashel are towns in which inland Irish county, bordering Galway and Cork?
Kerry
Tipperary
Kildare
Offaly
According to Jeff Bezos, what “has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being”?
Online reviews
Social media
Hunger
In materials science, the ratio of the contractile to the tensile strains is named after which French scientist, born in 1781?
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Charles Friedel
Siméon-Denis Poisson
Louis Pasteur
Which English cathedral is noted for stained-glass rose windows known as the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye?
Lincoln
Durham
Ely
York Minster
Totem and Taboo, and Civilisation and Its Discontents are early 20th-century works by which thinker?
Otto Rank
Frantz Fanon
Carl Jung
Sigmund Freud
15 and above.
You may not confer – and you certainly don’t need to, with a score like that! Bravo
14 and above.
You may not confer – and you certainly don’t need to, with a score like that! Bravo
13 and above.
You may not confer – and you certainly don’t need to, with a score like that! Bravo
12 and above.
You may not confer – and you certainly don’t need to, with a score like that! Bravo
11 and above.
You may not confer – and you certainly don’t need to, with a score like that! Bravo
10 and above.
And at the gong … you’ve done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final … but who needs that kind of stress anyway?
9 and above.
And at the gong … you’ve done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final … but who needs that kind of stress anyway?
8 and above.
And at the gong … you’ve done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final … but who needs that kind of stress anyway?
7 and above.
And at the gong … you’ve done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final … but who needs that kind of stress anyway?
6 and above.
And at the gong … you’ve done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final … but who needs that kind of stress anyway?
5 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
4 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
3 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
2 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
0 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
1 and above.
Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there’s no way you’re going through to the next round
The University Challenge grand final airs Monday 5 April at 8.30pm on BBC Two
