The Guardian newspaper has a Thursday quiz which passes me by most weeks. I usually do Thomas Eaton’s quiz on a Saturday but maybe I should add the Thursday questions to my weekly routine. I got five answers wrong from the 15 that featured on 22 June 2023. Click here if you want to try the questions yourself.

If you continue reading you will find out what I have learnt from the five questions that stumped me, relating to the following:

• The Danish PM;
• The leader of Plaid Cymru;
• What happens when steel wool is exposed to fluorine;
• The part played by Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls;
• The dialling code for India.

Mette Fredrikson is prime minister of Denmark, has been since June 2019. I should have got that: I looked up pictures of PMs last summer in quiz research. Fredrikson is also leader of Social Democrats, since 2015, and the youngest ever holder of both posts.

Rhun Ap Iorwerth is new leader of Plaid Cymru. “Ap Iorwerth, who represents Ynys Môn (Anglesey) in the Senedd and is a former journalist, was a deputy leader until Adam Price stepped down as head of the party last month”.

Fluorine fact: Steel wool bursts into flames when exposed to fluorine. The Royal Society Of Chemistry profile describes fluorine as “a very pale yellow-green, dangerously reactive gas. It is the most reactive of all the elements and quickly attacks all metals. Steel wool bursts into flames when exposed to fluorine.”

The name of the actor who played Regina George, leader of The Plastics in 2004 movie “Mean Girls”: Rachel McAdams, who was the nemesis of Lindsay Lohan’s Cady Heron. [I still haven’t seen this movie, so there’s a heap of cultural references that pass me by, as in the episode of “Modern Family” where Phil Dunphy finally watches it and realizes that his father-in-law Jay is the “mean girl” in his life.]

91 is the dialling code for: India. “The codes are actually grouped geographically, with zone 9 covering mostly countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of southern Asia.”

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