Pub trivia

• Malaria has been responsible for over half of all human deaths since the Stone Age, and currently kills a person every 30 seconds.

  All Parasites pub trivia

• Jack White of The White Stripes is fixated with the number three. He often signs his name Jack White III, owns a record company called Third Man Records, and has gone under the alias Three Quid. Why? While working as an upholsterer years ago, Jack noticed three staples holding some fabric to a piece of furniture, and became fixated with the number for evermore. As you do.

  All Pop & rock singers pub trivia

• If you're normal and don't enjoy warm beer, reach for the brown bottled kind. Brown coloured glass is the best at blocking UV light, which not only warms the beer but can affect the taste too.

  All Beer pub trivia

• When the island-volcano of Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the sound was heard 3,100 miles away, making it the loudest noise ever recorded.

  All Volcanoes pub trivia

• A single little brown bat, from the myotis species, can eat up to 1000 mosquitoes in a single hour – more than its own body weight nightly - and is one of the world's longest-lived mammals for its size, with life spans of almost 40 years.

  All Bats pub trivia

• America gets all the credit for lunar exploration, but it was actually Russia that got to the lunar surface first. The Soviet Luna 2 landed on the Moon in 1959 – a whole decade before Neil Armstrong did the same.

  All Moon pub trivia

• Ever wondered where the golfing term "birdie" comes from? It seems we have an American named Ab Smith to thank. While striding around a course in 1899, he played what he described as a "bird of a shot", which became "birdie" over time. ("Bird" was 19th American slang for anything really, really good. Kind of like "cool" is for us.)

  All Golf pub trivia

• The Kama Sutra was first translated into English by a group of writers headed by Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who risked prosecution for obscenity when he privately printed it in England in 1883. The book quickly became an underground success, but it wasn't until 1963 that the book was legally published.

  All Kama Sutra pub trivia

• The oldest rugby club in the world is Dublin University Football Club. Founded in 1854, it is also happens to predate the first ever soccer club, Sheffield FC, by three years.

  All Rugby pub trivia

• Wall Street used to be an actual wall. The area was once a boundary of the original New Amsterdam settlement, and the wall was created by Dutch settlers as a defence against attacks by British invaders and Native Americans.

  All New York pub trivia

• The word ‘snooker’ was originally military slang for raw, inexperienced army recruits. This was why Neville Chamberlain once called an opponent ‘a regular snooker’ for missing an easy shot. The word stuck, and was soon taken on as the name of the game.

  All Snooker pub trivia

• During medieval England, it was once illegal to stand near the monarch when not wearing socks. It was also illegal to place a postage stamp with the image of the monarch upside down.

  All Strange laws pub trivia

• Although the Ancient Greeks and Romans did sometimes use corks as stoppers, their favoured way of sealing wine was to pour a layer of olive oil over the surface of the plonk. Lovely.

  All Wine pub trivia

• The fastest car in the world has a highest recorded speed of 257mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.78 seconds. Unfortunately, it's called the Ultimate Aero. But it could have been worse. It could have been called the Ultimate Twix.

  All Cars pub trivia

• The wrongest soft drink ever made has to be Kidsbeer. The beverage equivalent of candy cigarettes, it's a Japanese cola-style drink, aimed at children, that has been chemically tinkered to look like beer - complete with frothing head. The best part is the advertising strapline: "Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink."

  All Soft drinks pub trivia

• The "toughest US president" crown must go to Andrew Jackson, the seventh man to rule the roost. This swaggering gunslinger fought more than 13 duels in his time, taking bullets to the chest and once killing a rival almost at point blank range. And you thought George W Bush was a cowboy.

  All US Presidents pub trivia

• Rugby balls are shaped the way they are because the original balls, made by a cobbler near Rugby School, were fashioned from pigs' bladders. These bladders naturally became oval-shaped when inflated – a grisly process which literally involved blowing into them like balloons.

  All Rugby pub trivia

• The Kama Sutra isn't just for men. In fact, it provides women with plenty of advice on how to manipulate men, marry good husbands and how best to punish a hubby who cheats. It also devotes chapters to the art of prostitution, laying out a systematic guide to extracting the most money from unsuspecting punters.

  All Kama Sutra pub trivia

• Dennis Tito opened a new chapter in space exploration in April 2001 when he became the first paying space tourist, as a guest of the Russian space programme. He blasted off from Kazakhstan with two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz rocket, and visited the International Space Station.

  All Space firsts pub trivia

• Humans are set to return to the Moon in the newly-commissioned Orion spacecraft – described by one Nasa spokesman as "Apollo on steroids". Don't hold your breath, though – the mission has been pencilled in for 2019.

  All Moon pub trivia

• When Paris fell to the Nazis in World War Two, some spirited Frenchmen cut the lift cables in the Eiffel Tower so that Hitler would be forced to climb the steps to reach the top. Later, before his empire fell, Hitler ordered the Tower destroyed – but his General in Paris disobeyed him.

  All Eiffel Tower pub trivia

• The swiftest snake on land is the Black Mamba, a notorious African monster that can reach speeds of up to 12 miles per hour. And they're amongst the most deadly too.

  All Snakes pub trivia

• The phrase "great white hope" was invented for US boxer James J Jeffries, who came out of retirement in 1910 to take on Jack Johnson, the first ever black heavyweight champion. Jeffries was the "great white hope" who'd supposedly put the "black upstart" back in his place. Instead, Johnson pummelled him into the ground.

  All Boxing pub trivia

• The human body is better suited to two four-hour sleep cycles than one eight-hour one. It has also been shown that the colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you'll have a bad dream.

  All Human body pub trivia

• "The Ashes" Test series got its name from a satirical column written in 1882 after Australia triumphed over England. The column said that English cricket had died and been cremated, with the ashes taken to Australia. The teams' next confrontation was therefore billed as the quest to regain "the ashes".

  All Cricket pub trivia

• The average worker bee will make half a teaspoon's worth in its lifetime. A bee can fly at about 15mph, visiting up to 100 flowers on each collection trip.

  All Bees & Honey pub trivia

• More countries compete in the Olympic Games than there are in the United Nations. (203 versus 192, if you're counting.)

  All Olympics pub trivia

• The Honduran white bat is snow white with a yellow nose and ears. It cuts large leaves to make "tents" which protect its small colonies from harsh jungle rains. It is one of fifteen other species known to make tents.

  All Bats pub trivia

• Sean Connery was not the first James Bond. Barry Nelson played the role in a 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, and two years later Bob Holness – yes, the future host of Blockbusters – played him in a radio adaptation of Moonraker.

  All James Bond pub trivia

• It has been recorded that the Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

  All Science pub trivia

• Russia's Valentina Tereshkova became the first women in space. She boarded Vostok 6 in June 1963 and orbited the earth 48 times on a mission lasting nearly three days. Her training had been kept so secret that even her mother didn't know until news of the flight was announced on radio.

  All Space firsts pub trivia

• Wickets are so named because the word 'wicket' actually refers to a small gate, and the pattern formed by the cricket stumps led to the term being adopted.

  All Cricket pub trivia

• The majority of the Kama Sutra isn't about sex. Much of it is a guide to being an Indian man about town, with advice on dressing well and eating properly.

  All Kama Sutra pub trivia

• Cupid is little more than a chemical reaction in our body, according to US researcher Helen Fisher. Although 'lust' has long been attributed to testosterone and oestrogen, Fisher puts 'love' down to a cocktail of adrenalin and serotonin.

  All Dating pub trivia

• Mt Etna, on Sicily – Europe's largest and most active volcano – blows smoke rings, each 650ft across and lasting up to 10 minutes as they drift up to 3,000ft. It is thought that this phenomena is caused by the channeling of gas through the unusually shaped volcanic vent.

  All Volcanoes pub trivia

• When the Queen leaves Buckingham Palace to attend the State Opening of Parliament every year, an MP is ceremonially "held hostage" at the Palace to ensure that the monarch isn't kidnapped or executed by any treasonous MPs.

  All Parliament pub trivia

• Madonna started her career as a drummer in an 80s band called The Breakfast Club. She went onto become part of another group called Emmy before finally deciding to go it alone as a singer.

  All Pop & rock singers pub trivia

• We have a dog to thank for both Chewbacca and Indiana Jones. The dog in question was George Lucas's pet Alaskan malamute Indiana, whose name was given to the archaeologist and whose appearance and character inspired the Star Wars Wookiee.

  All Dogs pub trivia

• That dip in the bottom of a wine bottle is called a punt, and noone really knows why it's there. The general consensus is that they had a stabilising purpose in ancient, rocky, handblown bottles, but that they're kept today for prestige value (leading to the popular belief that more expensive bottles have deeper punts).

  All Wine pub trivia

• In Mexico, tortillas are sometimes made with red and white Agave worms - the same worms found in mescal bottles. Their popularity largely stems from the belief that they are an aphrodisiac.

  All Strange meals pub trivia

• Love isn't blind - it just doesn't like glasses, according to research by the University of Warwick. A study of clubbers found their 'pulling power' increased by up to 400% if they ditched their specs. Half of those surveyed reported increased self confidence when they swapped glasses for contacts, while 80% who wore glasses felt less able to attract a mate.

  All Dating pub trivia

• The "father of the car" was Karl Friedrich Benz, and the first car was the Benz Patent Motorwagen, built in 1885. And it was a three-wheeler, so don't scoff at Reliant Robin drivers – they're keeping it real.

  All Cars pub trivia

• Dynamite was invented in 1866 by Alfred Nobel. There is now a major Peace Prize named after him, but we doubt use of his invention would help you win one.

  All Science pub trivia

• It is estimated that at any one time, 32 per cent of the British population are sleeping, 11 per cent are eating, 0.7 per cent are drunk, 0.3 per cent are in the bath or shower, and 0.2 per cent are having sex.

  All Statistics pub trivia

• The largest king's ransom in history was raised in 1194 by Richard the Lionheart, to buy his release from Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. The English people were forced to contribute almost 150,000 marks to free their king who ironically didn't speak a word of English and hated being over here.

  All Royals & Rulers pub trivia

• A staggering 1.3 billion of the world's population suffer from hookworms, minute monsters that cause anaemia by sucking the blood from the intestinal lining.

  All Parasites pub trivia

• In North Africa and the Middle East, nomadic tribes feast on roasted camel. Thanks to their North African Empire, the French developed a taste for camel too, though in France the preferred dish is camel's foot.

  All Strange meals pub trivia

• Snooker was first played in 1875 by a group of British officers stationed in India. The lashing monsoons would often leave the men with nothing to do but play billiards, and they ended up experimenting with the rules until the new game of snooker was born.

  All Snooker pub trivia

• Richard Nixon had a dog named Checkers and Clinton had a cat named Socks. But John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, went the whole hog and had a pet alligator which lived in one of the White House bathrooms.

  All US Presidents pub trivia

• The most outrageously named Bond girl must surely be Goldfinger's Pussy Galore. But the producers originally wanted to play it safe by calling her Kitty Galore instead. Director Guy Hamilton stubbornly refused, reasoning that "If you were a 10-year-old boy and knew what the name meant, you weren't a 10-year-old boy, you were a dirty little f*cker."

  All James Bond pub trivia

All pub trivia