Why are bats blind and why were mummies wrapped in bandages? Try our Halloween kids’ quiz

Boo! Illustration: Hennie Haworth/The Guardian

1. 1 Why do we carve faces on pumpkins for Halloween?

   1. To light the way for ghosts and witches

   2. To scare away ghosts

   3. Because there’s not much else we can do with all the pumpkins

   4. Just for fun

2. Where was Halloween invented?

   1. America

   2. England

   3. Papua New Guinea

   4. Ireland

3. Why are bats blind?

   1. They’re not

   2. They don’t need to see because they use sonar

   3. Because they live in the dark, so there’s nothing to see

   4. Because their ears use all the power, their eyes can’t see

4. Why don’t spiders get stuck in their own webs?

   1. Webs aren’t sticky; things get stuck in them only if they fly into them and then get caught

   2. They do, but they know how to get the web off

   3. They don’t touch their webs much, so they can’t get stuck

   4. They have some kind of anti-stick substances on their legs

5. Why did the ancient Egyptians wrap mummies in bandages?

   1. To keep them warm

   2. To look scary

   3. To camouflage them so that you couldn’t see them

   4. To protect the body so it could be used again in the afterlife

Solutions

1:B - Children have carved vegetables (turnips, then pumpkins) and lit them with candles at Halloween for thousands of years. They’re made to look like spirits to scare away any ghosts., 2:D - Halloween began as the Samhain festival 2,000 years ago in Ireland. It marked the start of winter, when the ancient Celts thought the barrier between our world and that of ghosts became thin. In the 1800s, lots of Irish people moved to the US, taking the festival with them., 3:A - “Blind as a bat” is wrong! Some, including insect-­eating bats, have tiny eyes; others, such as fruit bats, have large eyes, but they all use them to see the world, some in colour, others in black and white., 4:C - Spiders only touch the web’s sticky threads with the little hairs on their legs and claws – unlike a fly, which splats into a web with its whole body and gets trapped., 5:D - The Egyptians thought when a person died, the spirit left the body, but if the body was preserved it could come back to life. They removed the organs, dried the body out, then wrapped it up to protect it, so the owner could use it again in the afterlife.

Scores

1. 5 and above.

2. 4 and above.

3. 3 and above.

4. 2 and above.

5. 0 and above.

6. 1 and above.

• Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a weekly podcast answering children’s questions, out now as a book. Does your child have a question? Submit one here