Quiz of the Year answers

Art & design

1) The Saatchi Gallery 2) She was the subject of Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, the painting that broke the record for a work sold at auction by a living artist 3) They were hung the wrong way up 4) An exhibition of works by Banksy and other graffiti artists, held in a disused road tunnel in Leak Street, London SE1 5) Japan 6) Newly commissioned public art works, particularly the statue of Lloyd George in Parliament Square, the Monument to the Unknown Construction Worker near the Tower of London and the embracing couple at St Pancras station, which he described as "truly horrific" 7) British painter Adam Neate 8) Doha, capital of Qatar 9) Hadrian 10) Kate Moss. Marc Quinn's golden sculpture Sphinx showed the model with feet behind her head 11) Dubai 12) Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery

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Media

1) Birdsong – a looped track featuring the sound of birdsong from a British country garden 2) Carol Vorderman 3) Graham Norton 4) Damon Albarn 5) Absolute 6) The Wall Street Journal's 7) Batman 8) Little Britain USA 9) Moving Wallpaper was a comedy drama series about the production of the soap opera Echo Beach 10) a) Cherie Blair, Speaking for Myself b) John Prescott, Prezza c) Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years 11) Voluptua, aka Georgina Baillie, was the subject of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross's lewd phone messages left for her grandfather Andrew Sachs during a Radio 2 show; Lesley Douglas, controller of Radio 2, resigned in the aftermath of the controversy

Business & the economy

1) 2 per cent (interest rates) 2) XL Leisure 3) The threshold at which stamp duty becomes payable 4) WrapIt 5) Landsbanki 6) Lehman Brothers 7) Aldi 8) VAT is reduced from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent for this 13-month period

International affairs

1) They have the constitutional right to be tried by a US civilian court rather than a military court 2) c 3) China 4) President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia 5) Thailand: a court ruled that Samak Sundaravej had breached the constitution by accepting payment for work as a TV chef 6) Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President of Cuba in February, and Kim Jong-il, who appeared in a badly doctored photograph in early November amid reports of ill-health 7) General Motors (GM), Ford and Chrysler 8) The new prime minister and king of Bhutan, respectively 9) Kosovo, which declared its independence in February, but which Serbia still considers part of its sovereign territory 10) a 11) Nicolas Sarkozy 12) b – He admitted to being unprepared for war at the beginning of his presidency

Film

1) It was the title of the film shown at the annual Royal Film Performance 2) Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon) and George W Bush (W) 3) Olga Kurylenko, for collaborating with James Bond in Quantum of Solace: "a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR" 4) Indiana Jones 5) Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men) 6) Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard 7) Jack Black starred in all three films 8) The Dark Knight 9) Waltz with Bashir 10) Bruges, in In Bruges 11) c, a, b 12) Madonna's Filth and Wisdom

Celebrity

1) David Beckham 2) Peaches Geldof 3) Brangelina 4) Lee McQueen 5) They were contestants on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! 6) Jade Goody 7) His skull was used in the "Alas, poor Yorick" scene 8) Victoria Beckham 9) Lily Allen 10) a 11) They all featured in adverts for M&S this year 12) I-E; II-D; III-A; IV-C; V-B

Environment & science

1) India 2) Donald Trump 3) It found that moderate drinkers are at a 30 per cent lower risk of developing heart disease than teetotallers 4) Heathrow Airport 5) c 6) Scientists switched on the Large Hadron Collider, which some feared could create black holes that would expand to engulf the Earth 7) c 8) In space, during repair work on the International Space Station. It is now in orbit 9) The operation was conducted under local anaesthetic, and Adcock played the banjo throughout the operation 10) b

Music

1) Peter Kay's "The Winner's Song", taken from his spoof reality show, Britain's Got the Pop Factor... 2) Sir Elton John 3) Leona Lewis 4) Michael Jackson 5) Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy, in the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper Global Times 6) Take That 7) John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) 8) MGMT 9) Blur 10) That it was headlined by a hip-hop artist (Jay-Z) rather than a rock band

Prize winners

1) Best of the Booker, for Midnight's Children 2) The building that won the Riba Stirling prize (for Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Alison Brooks architects, and Macreanor Lavington) 3) Brit Award for best British group 4) Mercury Prize, for their album The Seldom Seen Kid 5) Nobel Peace Prize 6) Turner Prize 7) The Palme d'Or at Cannes was won by Entre les murs (aka The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet 8) Best actor Oscar, for There Will be Blood 9) Duncan Lawrie Dagger for crime fiction for Blood from Stone 10) The Killers frontman was named GQ's most stylish man of the year 11) Rear of the Year 12) They were the stars of the Worst TV advert of 2008, for Gillette

Go figure

9.69 seconds

e) The time in which Usain Bolt won the 100m race and set a new world record at the Olympics

$20m

b) The highest-ever one-off prize awarded for a team sport, to the winners of the Stanford Super Series Twenty20 cricket tournament

22 miles

f) The distance travelled by "Fusionman", Yves Rossy, who became the first person to cross the English Channel using a single jet-propelled wing

1,500 metres

c) The length of the world's largest ostrich sandwich, made in Tehran

10,024,724,896,912

g) A snapshot of the US national debt, in dollars, on 30 September – the day the National Debt Clock in Times Square ran out of digits

231 million per cent

d) Zimbabwe's inflation rate of as of July 2008

89.7 sextillion (1,021) per cent

a) Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate as of 14 November 2008, according to a study by the Cato Institute

Literature

1) d 2) Heston Blumenthal's Big Fat Duck Cookbook 3) They were all on the shortlist of Richard and Judy's Summer Reads 4) Jonathan Ross 5) They were against the introduction of age-banding on children's books 6) She was nominated for an award for her children's book, Perfect Ponies: My Pony Care Book, even though she didn't write it all herself 7) Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) for her novel Shire Hell 8) Cherie Blair's Speaking for Myself, in which she discussed a memorable trip to Balmoral 9) Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the jury of the Nobel Prize, was describing American literature 10) Netherland by Joseph O'Connor 11) He wrongly named Mr Bullough as the winner of Wales' Book of the Year at the awards ceremony, only realising his mistake when the author was moments away from the stage

US election

1) c; Hockeygate was coined after a scandal in Indian hockey 2) Pitbull and pig 3) a (30 Jan); d (7 Feb); b (4 Mar); c (12 Jun) 4) New Hampshire 5) The theory that a significant minority of voters tell opinion polls that they intend to vote for a non-white candidate, yet vote for his white opponent on election day 6) a 7) a) Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, said it first on the third day of the Republican National Convention; Rudy Giuliani picked up the chant later b) John McCain, in answer to the question, "When do we send them an airmail message to Tehran?", during the primaries in April 2007 c) Tina Fey, in her first appearance as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. The real Palin line was, "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska", from an early September interview with ABC News 8) Missouri 9) Gore Vidal 10) Same-sex marriage 11) Aspen

Obituaries

1) Isaac Hayes 2) Alliance for the Future of Austria 3) Beryl Cook 4) Heath Ledger 5) David Foster Wallace 6) Sierra Nevada 7) Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple 8) Richard James Edwards, aka Richey James 9) Alexander Solzhenitsyn 10) Studs Terkel

Politics

1) Susan, according to a membership list leaked earlier this year 2) A Segway stand-up electric scooter 3) Damien Green MP 4) George Osborne 5) Employing family members, and using their parliamentary allowance to pay them 6) London Mayor Boris Johnson, as revealed in an episode of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? 7) The Labour party gave permission for his image to be used in an advertising campaign promoting Fiji as a holiday destination 8) She wore a stab-proof vest 9) Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls 10) On a train from London Waterloo to Surrey 11) Tony Blair

Sport

1) Roger Federer 2) Ronnie O'Sullivan 3) b 4) Sachin Tendulkar (India) 5) Hamilton won five; Massa won six 6) Yeats (that was the name of the horse) 7) Honda 8) Rugby League 9) Diego Maradona (Argentina) 10) Andy Fordham, aka "The Viking" 11) b 12) Arsene Wenger, his captain was William Gallas 13) Shane Warne

Olympics

1) The Bird's Nest 2) Mark Spitz 3) She took part in both the Olympics and the Paralympics 4) Steven Spielberg 5) Second 6) Water polo

Gift horses (and other beasts)

1) d A rare Lipizzaner horse named Kanizo was given to the Queen on the second day of her state visit to Slovenia in October. The Queen requested that Kanizo remain at the stud farm in Lipica to be cared for, but accepted a plaque acknowledging her ownership 2) e Taiwan finally accepted a pair of pandas as a gift of friendship from China in August: the pandas had originally been offered to Taiwan three years previously 3) a Taiwan reciprocated China's gift of two pandas with a rare Formosan serow mountain goat and a sika deer 4) b A Siberian tiger cub was given to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin for his 56th birthday in October; he later donated it to a zoo in southern Russia 5) c The Peruvian Hairless Dog Association offered the dog to President-elect Barack Obama and family in a letter to the US embassy in Lima in November, stating that the breed would be perfect for Obama's daughter Malia, who is allergic to most breeds