Building Big Quiz
They're big, they're tall, they're heavy, they're spacious — how much do you know about these giant engineering projects? Test your knowledge with this quiz!
The Akashi Kaikyo bridge in Japan is the longest spanning suspension in the world. What other world record does it have?
The tallest bridge towers
The widest road on a bridge
The biggest snow plows
The towers that hold it up are 928 feet tall, higher than those of any other bridges in the world. That's almost as tall as the Chrysler Building.
How much did it cost to build the World Trade Center in New York?
$4 million
$400 million
$400 billion
Once you get above a million bucks, it's all just "a lot of money" to me, but the answer is $400 million. The twin towers were the tallest in the world when they were finished in 1973, but the Sears Tower passed them a few years later.
What is the Eiffel Tower made of?
Steel
Brass
Iron
It's made of wrought iron, arranged in an open lattice pattern so the wind can blow through. The tower was built in less than two years and opened just in time for the Paris World's Fair in 1889. Tourists loved the elevators.
What does concrete do as it hardens?
Suck up heat.
Release heat.
Expand.
Concrete releases heat as it cures. Engineers calculate that if you just poured the concrete for the Hoover Dam, it would take 125 years to cool down. So the concrete was poured into forms that contained cooling coils; cold water was circulated through them to cool the blocks of concrete.
How was the Chunnel — the rail tunnel under the English Channel — dug?
Naked mole rats
Dynamite
A tunnel-shaped machine
Miners with pickaxes
It's actually called a tunnel boring machine, which makes it sound like a machine that wants to show the tunnel its vacation pictures. It's a big cylinder with a whirling cutter on its front. The tunnel (actually, it's three tunnels) was completed in 1994.
What or who is Burj Khalifa?
The tallest building in the world
The largest mosque in the world
The heaviest man who ever lived
The Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai, is the tallest structure in the world. It's 2,717 feet tall — more than half a mile. I don't know why anyone needs a building that tall.
Before the Burj Khalifa, what was the tallest man-made structure ever built?
The CN Tower in Toronto
A radio tower in Poland
The Sears Tower
The Warsaw radio tower, built in 1974, was 2,120 feet tall. It collapsed in 1991. Now that the Burj Khalifa is up, the second tallest structure currently standing in the world is a tower in North Dakota, at 2,063 feet.
In the song "It's the Hard-Knock Life" in the musical Annie, what building — the tallest in the world when it was finished in 1930 — is the orphanage supposed to shine like?
Chrysler Building
Empire State Building
Sears Tower
The Chrysler Building. It is quite shiny, as buildings go.
Correct
Um, your knowledge of all things big seems rather...small? Maybe you should try our Nano Technology Quiz!
Correct
Not bad. You seem to have a good grasp on the big stuff. Challenge yourself to the ultimate Engineering Quiz and see if you can beat your score!
Correct
Wow, you must have a really big brain! We're guessing you might like our Big, Bigger Biggest Video. Or see if you can take it from giant to tiny with our Nano Quiz!
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