Answers to (and winner of) our December 2026 Christmas Quiz

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Answers to (and winner of) our December 2026 Christmas Quiz
In a statistical quirk, the only person out of last newsletter's 31 participants who got all of the questions right also won the competition (you can see details - and answers - here).

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 January 2026

Out of the 31 people who entered our newsletter competition in December, it was David Thompson of Bury Council whose name was pulled out of our randomised Excel sorting hat. Congratulations to David, who wins this month's £50 voucher.

In our quizzes everyone's chance of winning is proportional to their score. David was the only person who impressively managed to score 100%, although a few people got very close, so his probability of winning was slightly higher than everyone else's.

Here are the answers to the questions, with some notes and sources:

No.	Notes	Difficuulty
1	The word Sphairistike means pertaining to a sphere - we now know this game as tennis.	Middling
2	Amazingly all of these UK gold medal winners were born on the same day: 23rd of March.	Middling
3	James Herriot was named after the Scottish goalkeeper with the same name. He had to change his name because the RCVS wouldn't allow vets to advertise!	Hardest
4	Like so may game shows, these were all based on original Dutch formats.	Middling
5	It helps to be of a certain age to know this one: the lead character from the Man from UNCLE was called Napoleon Solo.	Easiest
6	The series in question was All's fair starring Kim Kardashian. It's worth reading some of the reviews - this one, for example.	Middling
7	Jamie and Juliette's second youngest child is called Buddy Bear Maurice Oliver.	Easiest
8	Apparently pigs don't have the ability to look up!	Easiest
9	*ZIP* stands for Zone Improvement Plan, a system introduced in 1963 by the US Postal Service.	Middling
10	Amazingly this word comes from the Latin musculus, diminutive of mus meaning mouse, because the appearance of the flexed biceps resembles (apparently) the back of a mouse.	Hardest
11	This was the agreed phrase by which the announcemet of the world's first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was communicated over the phone to the chairman of the National Defence Research Committe in the US in 1942.	Hardest
12	These spomeniks spread throoughout the former Yugoslavia are one of the things on the author's bucket list of things to see!	Middling
13	Sudan has between 220 and 255 pyramids, easily eclipsing Egypt's total of about 118.	Middling
14	The product formerly known as Tryton is now called Aunt Bessie's!	Middling
15	When he began implementing Python, Guido van Rossum was also reading the published scripts from “Monty Python's Flying Circus”, a BBC comedy series from the 1970s. Van Rossum thought he needed a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious, so he decided to call the language Python.	Middling
16	The Bluetooth communications technology is named after the 10th century king of Denmark and Norway, Harald Bluetooth. The name was proposed in 1997 by one of the founders of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.	Middling
17	These tokens are the building blocks of any AI query (any prompt is turned into a matrix of numbers before submission to the relevant large language model).	Hardest
18	The original flags planted on the moon are almost certainly now bleached white.	Middling
19	This phrase refers to the tendency of plants to grow away from the Earth's gravity - the curve of bananas provides a famous example.	Middling
20	The first volume of Bill Gates' autobiography is called Source Code - it's not a bad read.	Middling

The ratings for how easy the questions were came from people's answers. Fewest people got question 3 about James Herriot right; most people got questions 5 and 7 correct.

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