Question 1: How old are the oldest known cave paintings?
Question 2: Which famous fashion designer founded the company that originally sold haute couture but expanded into ready-to-wear clothing, accessories, and fragrances?
Coco Chanel founded her namesake fashion label in 1909. She revolutionized women's fashion with timeless designs like her signature suits and little black dresses. The Chanel brand today remains a global powerhouse in the luxury fashion industry.
Question 3: Who invented the World Wide Web in 1989?
Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN. He wrote the first web browser and editor, and developed the protocols and standards that form the foundation of the modern web.
Question 4: Why was the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen significant in music history?
The music video for "Bohemian Rhapsody", filmed in 1975, is considered groundbreaking and helped launch the music video industry that took off with the start of MTV in 1981. The song itself was also highly innovative, employing an unusual structure and a blend of musical styles.
Question 5: How many plays are attributed to William Shakespeare?
While the exact number of plays written by Shakespeare is not known for certain due to questions of authorship and collaborations, 37 plays are traditionally attributed to him. These include famous works like Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare also wrote over 150 sonnets and several longer poems during his prolific career in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Question 6: What percentage of felony convictions in the U.S. result from plea bargains rather than jury trials?
The vast majority of criminal cases in the U.S. are resolved through plea bargains, where the defendant agrees to plead guilty, usually in exchange for a reduced charge or more lenient sentence, rather than going to trial. This is largely due to the overburdened court system.
Question 7: In meteorology, what is the name of the boundary between two air masses of different densities?
A front is the transition zone between two air masses of different densities, and is the principal cause of meteorological phenomena outside the tropics. In surface weather analyses, fronts are depicted using various colored lines and symbols.
Question 8: Who invented the cotton gin in 1793?
The cotton gin automated the cleaning of cotton, greatly reducing the time and labor required to separate cotton fibers from their seeds. This invention revolutionized the cotton industry and the economy of the southern United States in the antebellum period.
Question 9: In which musical would you hear the song "Defying Gravity"?
"Defying Gravity" is the show-stopping Act I finale in the hit Broadway musical Wicked, which tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. The song is a powerful duet between Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Glinda the Good Witch.
Question 10: When did NASA send the first human into space?
In April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting the Earth once in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. A month later, NASA launched Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight, making him the first American in space.
The oldest known cave paintings are located in the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina. They are estimated to be between 45,000 and 52,000 years old. Cave paintings have been found on every continent except Antarctica.