Christmas quiz round five: Can you spot the link?

Ten questions, 10 random things that link them. Can you guess them all?

(Getty)

1. How were the above linked this year, and who are they?

2. How were Marcus Rashford and Maro Itoje and linked in September?

3. @GenFlynn, @SidneyPowell1, @realDonaldTrump, @naomirwolf.

4. “Cheugy”, “Omicron”, (the tennis player Stefanos) “Tsitsipas”, (Billie) “Eilish”: how were they linked in December?

5. “The First 5,000 Days”; Jack Dorsey’s first tweet; “Side-eying Chloe”; a video clip of the basketball player LeBron James; “Nyan Cat”: all examples of what?

6. Hope, Juno, Endeavour, Tianhe, Zhurong, New Shepard NS-16.

7. Tom Daley, Tom Dean, Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny, Tom McEwen, Adam Peaty, Duncan Scott, Georgia Taylor-Brown, Alex Yee.

8. Kelly Tolhurst (January), Johnny Mercer (April), Matt Hancock (June), James Brokenshire (July).

9. In ascending order, Go_A; Dadi Freyr; Gjon’s Tears; Barbara Pravi; Maneskin.

10. Ana, Bill, Claudette, Danny, Elsa, Fred, Grace, Henri, Ida, Kate, Julian, Larry, Mindy, Nicholas, Odette, Peter, Rose, Sam, Teresa, Victor, Wanda.

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1. They all came out as gay, trans or non-binary: the musician Demi Lovato came out as non-binary; the musician Ezra Furman came out as trans, as did the actor Elliot Page; American footballer Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders, ice hockey player Luke Prokop of Edmonton Oil Kings and footballer Josh Cavallo of Adelaide United all came out as gay.
2. The education secretary Gavin Williamson announced that he had enjoyed a Zoom chat with Rashford. It transpired that he had in fact been talking to Itoje.
3. They are all Twitter accounts that were permanently banned. Naomi Wolf’s ban was for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
4. They all featured in a list compiled by the US Captioning Company of the most mispronounced words of the year. Other words included were “Dogecoin”, “Yassify” – and “Glasgow”, which was mispronounced by both Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
5. They are examples of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. “The First 5,000 Days”, by the graphic designer Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), sold at auction for $69m in March.
6. They are all space craft launched this year.
7. They are the members of Team GB who won more than one medal at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
8. They are all MPs who resigned from the government this year: Tolhurst was under-secretary of state for housing and rough sleeping; Mercer was under-secretary of state for defence people and veterans; Hancock was secretary of state for health and social care; Brokenshire, who died of cancer in October, was minister of state for security.
9. They were the top five finishers in the Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam in May, from Ukraine, Iceland, Switzerland, France and Italy respectively.
10. They were the Atlantic storm systems named in 2021.

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