The Trivia Lover's Guide to the World by Fuller Gary

Author:Fuller, Gary [Fuller, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2012-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

Dr. G says: The nineteenth-century fall of Khartoum even today fuels radical Islam. It is surprising that prominent current leaders have not claimed to be the Mahdi.

Trivia questions about rivers can be frustrating. Through the use of satellite imagery and other techniques of remote sensing, it has been possible to better determine the length of rivers. Even so, there’s no easy way to measure total length because the starting point is often unclear (e.g., Does the Mississippi actually start in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, or does it start somewhere in Montana or western Canada as part of the Missouri-Jefferson river system?) because rivers change course and because deltas are constantly changing as the river’s “load,” or soil and silt, is deposited.

Meanwhile, the so-called knowledge that generations of students have learned about rivers has become embedded in our minds . . . and it may be wrong. The amount of water flowing in rivers changes as well. There are seasonal changes, of course, but over time several rivers have seen major changes in their discharges. The Loire and the Tiber were once navigable but are no more, while the Colorado River, which once commonly flooded the Imperial Valley in California, loses almost all its water before reaching its outlet. A variation on this theme is that a wrong answer is given in a trivia contest and then passed on by word of mouth until it becomes embedded (but wrong) knowledge!

Strangely, one commonly asked river question seems to be always accompanied by the wrong answer even though there’s not the slightest doubt about the correct answer. Answer 28d: The longest river in Europe is not the Danube but the Volga. The Volga also has the greatest drainage area and the greatest discharge volume. Since the Volga was a Soviet river, perhaps it was a victim of the cold war! If that’s the case, it has certainly been rehabilitated, since its most famous city and the site of the turning point of World War II in Europe, Stalingrad, has been renamed Volgograd.

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