History Guild General History Quiz 116
See how your history knowledge stacks up!
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The stories behind the questions
1. What is the oldest company in Britain?
The Royal Mint – Founded around 886 CE, The Royal Mint Limited is a limited company that is wholly owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury and is under an exclusive contract to supply all the nation’s coinage.
2. Who was the leader of the USSR when the Berlin wall was built?
Nikita Khrushchev – Read more about the construction of the Berlin Wall here.
3. The 1977 Tenerife air disaster involved aircraft from which two airlines?
KLM and Pan Am – 583 people died when a KLM Boeing 747 attempted to take off without a clearance, and collided with a taxiing Pan Am 747.
4. Who wrote Vom Kriege (On War)?
Carl von Clausewitz – A text that is still influential today, almost 200 years after it was written, it’s most well known line is ‘War is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’.
5. In which country was Adolf Hitler born?
Austria-Hungary – Braunau am Inn, Austria on April 20, 1889.
6. Who were the first non-Chinese people to rule China?
Mongols – The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan started the conquest with small-scale raids into Western Xia in 1205 and 1207. By 1279, the Mongol leader Kublai Khan had established the Yuan dynasty in China and crushed the last Song resistance, which marked the onset of all of China under the Mongol Yuan rule.
7. What weapon is this?
V1 Rocket – an early cruise missile, it was also known to the Allies as the buzz bomb or doodlebug. At the peak of their use by the Germans in July 1944, more than one hundred V-1s a day were fired at southeast England. A total of 9,521 were fired at England, with a further 2,448 fired at Belgium and the Netherlands.
8. Which of these European countries colonised the Nicobar Islands?
All of the above – European colonisation on the islands began with the Danish East India Company in 1754. Between 1778 and 1783, William Bolts attempted to establish an Austrian colony on the islands on the mistaken assumption that Denmark–Norway had abandoned its claims to the islands. Italy offered to buy the Nicobar Islands from Denmark in 1864. Denmark sold the rights to the Nicobar Islands to Britain in 1868, which made them part of British India.
9. Who said ‘England had become a land where sheep eat men’?
Thomas More – More was describing the effects of enclosure, which saw the people lose access to the commons, which were enclosed for sheep to graze. This deprived people of land to farm or graze their own animals, forcing them to become wage labourers or starve.
10. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi also known as Mohammad Reza Shah, was the head of state of which country?
Iran – Shah or King of Iran from 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule was weakened by his support of the 1953 coup that removed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. This coup was orchestrated by the CIA and MI6. After this Mohammad Reza Shah was seen as somewhat of a puppet leader.
