Analysis of results from our Christmas Quiz, and the winner!

Out of 59 entries, this month's £50 Amazon voucher was won by ... someone from Southend Council, but unfortunately we're not sure who!  The perils of submitting an entry through a shared email address: all we know is that the person saved their test under the name Mel.  Thanks to Tom Dowler of Southend who has agreed to receive the £50 Amazon voucher on Mystery Mel's behalf, and use it to buy some educational material for his team!

Because the quiz was so hard, I thought I'd quickly run through the results to explain my reasoning.

Question 1 - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

66% of people got this question right:

Muhammad Ali-Jinnah was the founder of Pakistan.  The most popular wrong answer was that he performed the first human lung transplant (it does look like the sort of thing he would do).

Question 2 - Boxing Day

The second easiest question, with 90% of people getting this right:

Boxing Day is also known as St. Stephen's Day.

Question 3 - Surrendering British Colony

49% of people (just under half) got this right:

The British colony surrendered to Japan on Christmas Day 1941 was Hong Kong (this was a nasty question, since the obvious answer was Singapore - a trap many fell into).

Question 4 - Nicolae Ceausescu

Nicolae Ceausescu was executed after a trial:

66% of people got this right. The most popular wrong answer was that he died of a heart attack.

Question 5 - The Boxing Day Tsunami

This happened in 2004:

81% of people got this right - I'm not sure that I would have.

Question 6 - The World Wide Web

Apologies for this question!

This was the second hardest question: only 25% of people got it right (which means that statistically a random-number generator would have done as well).

The correct answer was B, but any of the others could well have been right:

Tim Berners-Lee's project actually used HTTP, TCP/IP and HTML.

Question 7 - It's a Wonderful Life

A surprisingly low 61% of people knew that the angel from this film was called Clarence Odbody:

I was quite proud that 15 people fell for my convincing sounding answer that famously you never find out the angel's name.

Question 8 - Donald You-Know-Who

An impressive 86% of you knew the answer to this one:

Donald Trump has a cameo appearance in Home Alone 2 (he's also appeared in 13 other films, but these didn't have any obvious Christmas links).

Question 9 - Christmas searches

Somehow, 68% of people managed to get that the most popular question was "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?":

The answer to the qusetion, by the way: of course it's a Christmas film!

Question 10 - White Christmas

68% of people correctly guessed that Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas:

By far the most common wrong guess was Bing Crosby.  He of course merely sang it.

Question 11 - False Noels

It's not easy thinking of 20 Christmas questions!

41% of people correctly guessed that all of these people were born with their current name.

Question 12 - Charlie Chaplin

This was my finest moment - I managed to come up with wrong answers which were so convincing that less than one in four people guessed the answer correctly (less than would happen if each person picked their answer randomly):

The only one of these facts which isn't true is that Charlie Chaplin had problems recognising faces.

Question 13 - The World is not Enough

The most common wrong answer to this question was Tomorrow Never Dies:

54% of people knew that Pierce Brosnan and Denise Richards appeared in "The World is not Enough" (the latter playing Dr. Christmas Jones, and thus providing a welcome - if tenuous - Christmas link).

Question 14 - maths interlude

In the song the 12 Days of Christmas, which gift was most plentiful?

75% of people correctly calculated that you get more geese and swans than anything else.

Question 15 - the missing reindeer

This was the easiest question - 97% of people got it right:

The missing reindeer was Dasher.

Question 16 - Periodic Table Christmas

32% correctly worked out which letters are not single-letter chemical symbols in the word CHRISTMAS:

The ones which are elements are C, H, I and S (carbon, hydrogen, iodine and sulphur respectively).

Question 17 - Kentucky Fried Japan

An impressive 73% of people knew that KFC is a traditional Japanese Christmas treat:

Here's the background to this surprising fact.

Question 18 - Father Christmas overseas

Only 32% of people guessed which name for Father Christmas was made up:

Papa Charles is the one made up, but almost as many people went for the German Weihnachtsmann.

Question 19 - Non-reindeer herders

This was probably the question I feel most guilty about - how could anyone possibly know the answer?

Because most people knew that they could eliminate the Sami people, 32% of people guessed this correctly (the answer is the Yanomami - not many reindeer in the Amazon rain forest).

Question 20 - Christmas Island

An impressive 76% of people knew - or guessed - that Christmas Island belongs to Australia:

The wrong guesses were evenly split between the other 3 answers.