Islands
Elementary
What on Earth!
That '90s Decade
Classics Book Club
400

This Southern nation, home to the Māori people and named after a Dutch province, only has 2 islands, and both are in the top 20 largest islands in the world!

What is New Zealand?

400

In its song on the Periodic Table, ASAPScience says that this element, atomic symbol Ca, "[helps] you grow strong" for its use in bone structure

What is calcium?

400

The Himalayan Mountain range was formed at a convergent boundary by these massive pieces of crust pushing against each other and rising

What are [tectonic] plates?

400

... when Columbus sailed the ocean blue

What is the 1490s?

400

This satirical allegorical novella was written by George Orwell to attack the institution of Stalinist communism who is represented by Napoleon, the piggish leader of the revolution

What is Animal Farm?

800

Home to the largest empire in world history, this island contains 3 of the 4 countries of the United Kingdom and is the largest island in Europe

What is [Great] Britain (not UK or England)?

800

This synthetic element is named after the Father of the Periodic Table

What is mendelevium?

800

Basalt and obsidian are two well-known types of these types of rocks - along with sedimentary and metamorphic - also found in Minecraft by mixing lava with water

What are igneous rocks?

800

... when Farrokh Bulsara (Freddie Mercury), one of the champions of music, passed away from bronchial pneumonia contracted from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

What is the 1990s?

800

This ancient Greek poem written by Homer takes over 15K lines of dactylic hexameter over 24 books to describe the Trojan War in excruciating detail

What is the "Iliad"?

1200

The US closed down its embassy with this nation in 1961 during the Cold War when Fidel Castro held nuclear weapons from its ally, the USSR

What is Cuba?

1200

Ancient Romans used a water-soluble powder called stibium, based on this element adjacent to tin, one of the earliest forms of mascara and eyebrow darkener 

What is antimony?

1200

While most dinosaurs died out in the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, a subset of Saurischian dinosaurs survived and evolved to this modern class of animals

What are birds/Aves?

1200

... when 4 young girls accused Sarah Good, the first of tens of women, of witchcraft in Massachusetts because of her poor reputation and general misfitting in Puritan society

What is the 1690s?

1200

This American novelist wrote Little Women (and its sequel, Little Men), about the maturity of 4 sisters from childhood to womanhood and roughly based on her own upbringing

Who was Louisa May Alcott?

1600

The Republic of Formosa - named by Portuguese explorers who thought the island was pretty - on this island existed for 151 days until a violent Japanese takeover of the capital in 1895

What is Taiwan?

1600

Americium-241, a radioactive isotope of element number 95, can be found in trace amounts in these home devices that can detect unexpected internal combustion

What are smoke detectors?

1600

Take a visit to Inner Space Caverns to see these two main similar-sounding types of formations created from calcite deposits on the cave ceiling and floor

What are stalactites and stalacmites?

1600

... when Robespierre incited a Revolution among the French populace and had Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI (and later, himself!) guillotined

What is the 1790s?

1600

This narrator of multiple Mark Twain novels, who grew up around the Mississippi River, has come under immense scrutiny in recent years for spreading racial stereotypes and frequently using the n-word

Who is Huckleberry "Huck" Finn?

2000

French painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin was initially a stockbroker but left his life and family to move to this Polynesian island and paint "exotic" nature (and marry 3 teenagers there...)

What is Tahiti?

2000

Scheelite is a source for this rare transition metal, useful in industrial application for its highest melting and boiling point of all known elements

What is tungsten (W)?

2000

This region sits below the lithosphere, in the upper mantle, where convection currents driven by heat in Earth's core circulate and drive continental drift

What is the asthenosphere?

2000

... when the King of France signed the Edict of Nantes and granted the Huguenots substantial rights and protection against religious persecution

What is the 1590s?

2000

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel written by this British author, who was considered Charles Dickens' successor and well known for his progressive and utopian novels like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds

Who is H.G. Wells?