Trivia quiz

I got the first two right but not the others. My answer for number 3 was close.

1. Why are cashew nuts generally not sold raw or in their shells?

2. What distinctive feature is shared by Maryland’s state cat, state bird, and state insect?

3. What was the top speed of the first police car in the U.S., introduced on the streets of Akron, Ohio, in 1899?

4. Whose presidential portrait, rejected by its subject as “the ugliest thing I ever saw,” now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.?

5. What names did explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark give to the rivers known today as the Salmon and the Bitterroot?


Answers below.

1. The shell of the cashew nut contains urushiol, the same painful skin irritant that’s in poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. Because the raw nut isn’t safe to eat if it has come into contact with the shell, it is generally steamed or boiled at a high temperature to destroy the urushiol.

2. Their coloring. All are orange, black, and white. The state cat is the calico; its bird, the Baltimore oriole; and its insect, the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly.

3. 16 mph. The electric vehicle, built by Akron Fire Department employee Frank Loomis, was equipped with two motors, electric lights, gongs, and a stretcher—and had to have its battery recharged every 30 miles.

4. Lyndon B. Johnson’s. Artist Peter Hurd had been commissioned to paint it as Johnson’s official White House portrait.

5. Lewis named the Bitterroot for Clark; Clark named the Salmon for Lewis. Neither name survived. But one very personal name Clark gave a river did stick: that of the Judith River in Montana, which he named for the woman he hoped to—and did—marry when the historic expedition to the Pacific coast ended.