Under FIBA rules, within how many seconds must a team attempt a shot at the basket?

The correct answer is B, Dr James Naismith. A Canadian physical instructor at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, he devised the game in 1891 to keep his class occupied indoors during a hard winter, nailed two peach baskets to the gallery railings and wrote thirteen rules, of which the ban on running with the ball survives as the travelling rule. Option A is wrong because William G. Morgan invented volleyball at Holyoke four years later, in 1895, and the two names are the commonest swap in this chapter. Option C is wrong because Walter Camp is remembered as the father of American football, where he introduced the line of scrimmage and the system of downs. Option D is wrong because no such person is associated with the origin of basketball; handball grew out of the work of several Scandinavian and German teachers rather than one inventor.

The correct answer is A, Mintonette. William G. Morgan gave the game that name in 1895 because he had borrowed the net and the light ball from badminton, and only afterwards did a watching professor suggest volleyball, from the volleying of the ball back and forth over the net. Option B is wrong because netball is a separate game, derived from early women's basketball, played seven to a side with a ring that has no backboard. Option C is wrong because pelota is the Basque court game played with a hard ball against a wall, related to jai alai. Option D is wrong because korfball is a mixed Dutch game, invented in the early twentieth century, in which teams of men and women shoot into a basket on a pole without a backboard.

The correct answer is A, 18 metres by 9 metres. The net divides the court into two squares of nine metres by nine metres, and an attack line is drawn three metres back from the centre line, behind which a back-row player must take off when attacking. Option B is wrong because 28 metres by 15 metres is the size of a basketball court under FIBA rules. Option C is wrong because 40 metres by 20 metres is the size of a handball court, the largest of the three indoor games in this group. Option D is wrong because no standard court among these games uses that measurement. The beach form of volleyball is smaller still, 16 metres by 8 metres with two players a side, and that figure is sometimes offered as a distractor.

The correct answer is C, 3.05 metres, which is exactly ten feet. The gallery railing in the Springfield gymnasium from which James Naismith hung his peach baskets in 1891 happened to be ten feet above the floor, and the height has stayed the same ever since for men and women alike. Option A is wrong, but 2.43 metres is worth memorising as the height of the volleyball net for men, the figure examiners most often put beside this one. Option B is wrong because 2.74 metres, or nine feet, is the height of the net in badminton at the posts. Option D is wrong because no team game fixes its target at three and a half metres. Pairing 2.43 metres with volleyball and 3.05 metres with basketball answers a large share of the questions from this chapter.

The correct answer is C, seven, that is six court players and one goalkeeper, with further players available as substitutes. Option A is wrong because five on court is the number in basketball. Option B is wrong because six is the number in volleyball, where the six rotate clockwise each time the right to serve passes to their side. Option D is wrong because eleven a side was the old outdoor form of handball, which was played at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 but died out; the game that survived and returned to the Olympics at Munich in 1972 is the indoor seven-a-side version. Remembering the sequence five for basketball, six for volleyball and seven for handball disposes of every counting question in this group.