I don’t normally write much about the social sciences, apart from education. But some of the research results in these sciences are strange and interesting, and it seems a shame to do nothing with them. So I’ve devised a little quiz. I’m going to leave it up here for a week, before posting the answers and where they come from.

I'll also offer a prize to one person who gets all twenty answers correct. This is a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2007, which has eight hundred pages of contacts and advice on getting started in newspapers, magazines, books, online and broadcast media.

It’s a good book. So good I bought it twice.

Right, here we go:

Snail-racing is an action-packed spectator sport compared to watching the drift of Earth’s continents, which usually move just a few centimetres a year – about as fast as fingernails grow. But occasionally events quicken dramatically, and become interesting enough for a "desk-bound geophysicist" like Dr Tim Wright to pack his bags and go camel-trekking across a desert.