Quiz 014 · published this Tuesday
SevenBoss is a trivia site for people who want the fact, not just the point. Pick an answer, get it marked instantly, read the explanation underneath. That's the whole product.
Seven questions about things that happened later than you think. Tap an answer. You'll be told immediately, and the explanation stays open underneath.
Question 01 of 07
Why: "Thou" had already retreated to Quaker meetings and rural dialect by the mid-1600s. What killed it in everyday speech was fashion, not grammar — the polite plural "you" spread upward from the merchant classes and never gave the ground back. By 1660 a Londoner addressing a stranger with "thou" sounded either devout or rude, and both were reasons to stop.
Question 02 of 07
Why: Radarange units existed from 1947, but they were water-cooled monsters the size of a fridge, sold to restaurants for the price of a car. The countertop model that made the microwave a household object — the Amana Radarange RR-1, air-cooled and priced at $495 — reached shops in 1967. Twenty years between invention and product is the normal gap; people just remember the invention.
Question 03 of 07
Why: Teaching at Oxford is documented from around 1096, and the Aztec triple alliance formed in 1428 — roughly 330 years later, so "about 200" is the closest honest answer. The comparison feels wrong because school history puts "medieval" and "Aztec" in separate mental drawers. They overlap. Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325, while Oxford was already 230 years old.
Question 04 of 07
Why: The shopping trolley is the baby of the group — Sylvan Goldman's folding wire cart reached a Oklahoma City grocery in 1937. The fax machine is the shock: a working pantelegraph was patented in 1843, thirty-three years before the telephone. The zipper arrived in 1893, the safety bicycle in 1885. Machines that move information are almost always older than machines that move people.
Question 05 of 07
Why: The Great Pyramid was finished around 2560 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC, so she stood about 2,530 years from the pyramid — and about 1,990 years from Apollo 11. The other three are all younger than her: the Parthenon by four centuries, the Colosseum by a century, the Pantheon by two. Ancient Egypt is not one period; it is a very long country.
Question 06 of 07
Why: The last use was 10 September 1977, in Marseille — the same year Star Wars opened and the first Apple II shipped. France abolished the death penalty in 1981. The guillotine is filed under "Revolution" in most people's heads, which is why a 1977 date lands as a joke rather than a fact.
Question 07 of 07
Why: Ghana changed over on 4 August 1974, which is later than Sweden's famous Dagen H in 1967 and Iceland's 1968. Samoa is the trap answer, but Samoa went the other direction — it switched from right to left in 2009 to match Australia and New Zealand. "Last" depends entirely on which way you're going.
0 / 7 correct
Every round stays up. No timers, no leaderboards — just the questions and the reasoning behind them.
Quiz 013
Seven inventions credited to the person who popularised them rather than the person who built them.
Quiz 012
Enclaves, straight lines drawn with a ruler, and one town that changes country twice a year.
Quiz 011
Where seven everyday dishes actually come from, which is rarely where the menu says.
Quiz 010
Seven famous figures that got repeated so often nobody checked them.
Quiz 009
Seven creatures whose reputations were written by someone who never met one.
Quiz 008
Seven words that used to mean the opposite, and the moment they flipped.
I started writing these because I kept losing trivia nights to facts I half-knew. I'd guess, get it wrong, and never find out why — the quiz would move on and the gap would stay open. So I started writing the explanation first and the question second. If I can't explain the answer in three sentences without hedging, the question doesn't go up.
Seven questions a round, because seven is the number you can finish in a coffee break and still remember the next morning. Every round is themed around one idea — a century that's later than it feels, a border that shouldn't exist, a food that travelled further than you'd guess. The theme is what makes the facts stick together.
No accounts, no scores saved, no streak to protect. You can play the same round twice and it won't judge you. If a question is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it and say so in the next round's notes.
One email a week with the new quiz. No marketing, no drip sequence — just the seven questions and the explanations.