1. When was the blowpipe which is still used for blowing hand-made glass vessels invented?

2. Name the four US Presidents whose heads are carved on Mount Rushmore, a granite cliff in South Dakota.
3. The Swastika, the emblem of the Nazi Party from 1920 to 1945 is a very ancient one and was originally a sign of good luck. True/false?
4. Who was Genghis Khan and what was his original name?
5. Who found the ruins of Troy?
6. Which nation revered cats?
7. Who were the three sisters who became famous English novelists?
8. The author of Black Beauty was a campaigner against cruelty to animals. What was her name?
9. Who invented the cotton gin?
10. Who was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park?

[Answers]

1. The blowpipe was invented in the eastern Mediterranean area about 30 BC.

2. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theadore Rossevelt, representing the country's founding, expansion, preservation and unification. Work on this began in 1927 and was completed way after 1941.

3. True. The name swastika comes from the Sankrit language and means well-being. It has been found on European pottery of the New Stone Age in the Minoan ruins of Crete and in the ruins of Troy. It was common in India and was taken by Buddhists to China and Japan.

It was also found among the ancient cultures of North and South America. The usual form of the Swastika was with the arms pointing anticlock wise. The Nazi's used it with the arms pointing the other way and the symbol standing in one corner.

4. He was a Mongol chieftain and his original name was Temujin. He was born in 1162 in a tent in the Gobi Desert, in Central Asia. He became the leader of his tribe at the age of 13 when his father died. He won many battles and gathered more and more tribes under his leadership. When he died in 1227 he left behind a large empire which was divided among his four sons.

5. They were discovered in 1873 by Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant who had become a millionaire at the age of 36.

6. Egypt. About 3,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. One of their goddesses named Bast or Bastet had a cat's head. Archaeologists have found underground cat cemeteries where the mummified bodies of cats have been reverently laid to rest, each with a saucer of milk and mummified rats or mice to sustain them in the afterlife.

7. The Bronte Sisters

8. Anna Sewell.

9. An ingenious 28-year-old American law student named Eli Whitney, who produced it in 1793. The machine 'gin' is a contraction of ‘engine’ and it separates cotton fibres from the seed. Whitney's device could do this task as quickly as 50 people working by hand and it soon revolutionised the American cotton industry.

10. Thomas Alva Edison who produced more than 1,000 inventions.