Leopards in UP, feline noir on the Net and now, the grand opening of Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium, Britain’s first cat café, where you can spend time with 10 in-house cats or bring your own… It’s just the right time for a cat quiz.

Cats big and small

1 Melody, Valerie, manager Alex Cabot and roadie Alan M are four of the five main members of which music group? I know this is the kind of stuff you pretend to have never read, but answer anyway!

2 In 2000, which film became the first foreign language feature to get 10 Oscar nominations?

3 The Liger, a cross between a lion and a tigress, found only in captivity, is considered to be the largest of the felines. Which is the largest feline found in the wild?

4 For what reason did physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack and electrical engineer Geoffrey Hounsfield share a Nobel in medicine in 1979?

5 Which bestselling tune in one of the most popular musicals of all time is sung by a puss named Grizabella, played most notably on stage by Elaine Paige?

6 The name of which specific cat colouring originates from a city on the Malabar coast?

7 The Japanese maneki-neko or ‘fortune cat’ is one of the most ubiquitous good luck charms in Asia. Traditionally, how is the cat depicted in a maneki-neko?

8 We tend to remember Clive Lloyd as cricket’s ‘Big Cat,’ thanks to his amazing reflexes. But which English cricketer of the ’90s was nicknamed ‘The Cat’ because of his propensity to doze off in the dressing room?

9 Socks, the cat, was the official White House pet during the administration of which American president?

10 Which 19th century artist and author was so devoted to his cat that when he moved to Italy, he asked his architect to build a replica of his English home so that his tabby, Foss, would not feel distressed? He also drew his cat in one of his most famous rhymes.

Answers

1. Josie & the Pussycats, and I will not believe you even if you pretend to have never read an Archie comic!

2. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It is a cat quiz.

3. The Siberian Tiger

4. For creating the CAT scan – Computerised Axial Tomography – now more commonly known as the CT scan. (Admit it! It's a nice question, even though it's a bit of a stretch on the theme)

5. Memory, from Cats, based on TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

6. Calico, from Calicut

7. Sitting up with one paw lifted. Depending on the charm, it could be either paw.

8. Phil Tuffnel

9. Bill Clinton, in 1997. Socks had to finally give way to a dog in the White House.

10. Edward Lear, you can see Foss in the illustrations of The Owl & The Pussycat

Joy Bhattacharjya is, in this age of televisions pundits and Facebook gurus, simply grateful that facts are not opinions.

Follow Joy on Twitter >@joybhattacharj

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