The answers, explained
From insects to the computer mouse: puzzle #17, explained
Seven numbers, seven stories. Here is the thinking behind every answer in Range Squeeze #17, and where to read more.
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This article explains the answers to puzzle #17, so it unlocks once Friday 23 October 2026 is over.
Play today’s puzzle Past answersHow many legs does an insect have?
6 legs
Six legs, three body parts
Every adult insect has six legs, attached in three pairs to the thorax, the middle of its three body sections. The other two are the head and the abdomen.
How do they walk so steadily? Many insects use a tripod gait: the front and back legs on one side move together with the middle leg on the other side, so three feet are always on the ground.
Spiders are not insects. They are arachnids, with eight legs, two body parts and no antennae.
What is the highest score in ten-pin bowling?
300 points
Twelve strikes in a row
A perfect game in ten-pin bowling scores 300. It takes 12 strikes in a row: one in each of the ten frames, plus two bonus balls in the tenth.
Why 300? A strike scores 10, plus the pins knocked down by your next two balls. Three strikes in a row make 30 for the first of them, and ten frames of 30 add up to 300.
Three perfect games in a row make a “900 series”. The first one officially recognised was bowled by Jeremy Sonnenfeld in the United States in 1997.
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In what year was Sputnik 1 launched?
1957
A beep from orbit
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957. It was a polished metal ball about 58 centimetres across, with four long antennas, and it went round the Earth every 96 minutes.
What did it do? Mostly, it beeped. Radio amateurs around the world could pick up its signal, and that simple beep showed that the Soviet Union could put objects into orbit.
The launch started the Space Race. The United States set up NASA the following year, and within four years Yuri Gagarin had become the first person in space.
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How many March sisters are there in Little Women?
4 sisters
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy
Little Women follows the four March sisters: Meg, the eldest; Jo, the writer; gentle Beth; and Amy, the youngest, who wants to be an artist.
Were they real? Partly. Louisa May Alcott grew up with three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, and modelled the Marches on her own family, with Jo standing in for herself.
The story has been filmed many times, most recently by Greta Gerwig in 2019, with Saoirse Ronan as Jo.
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How old was Malala Yousafzai when she won the Nobel Peace Prize?
17 years old
The youngest Nobel winner
Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17, making her the youngest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize. She shared it with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner against child labour.
What was it for? Her campaign for girls’ education. She started speaking out as a schoolgirl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, writing a diary for the BBC under a pen name when she was 11.
She later studied at the University of Oxford, and set up the Malala Fund, a charity that helps girls stay in school.
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In what year was the first LEGO minifigure released?
1978
A smile that stuck
The first LEGO minifigures appeared in 1978: police officers, doctors and other everyday people, with movable arms and legs and a simple printed smile.
Why so simple? The designer, Jens Nygaard Knudsen, wanted a figure children could imagine into any role. For years every figure had the same yellow face and smile, so no particular person or mood was implied.
Billions have been made since. The company itself started in Denmark in the 1930s, and its name comes from the Danish words leg godt, meaning “play well”.
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In what year was the computer mouse first shown to the public?
1968
The mother of all demos
Douglas Engelbart showed the computer mouse to an audience in San Francisco in December 1968. In the same presentation, which lasted an hour and a half, he showed windows, clickable links and a video call, decades before most people owned a computer.
Why call it a mouse? The cable coming out of the back looked like a tail. The first one was a wooden box with two metal wheels underneath, set at right angles to track movement.
The event became known as the Mother of All Demos. The mouse reached ordinary homes in the 1980s, with computers such as Apple’s Macintosh.
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