1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us and we'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The astronomer
The ones that got away
N.B. This quiz began with five picture questions for which we were given ten minutes during which smartphones were permitted. As such for questions 1 and 2 only you should/can allow yourself around four minutes to try and use Google (or similar) to work out the answers. The only restriction is to limit yourself to what you could reasonably expect to do with the pictures on a physical piece of paper in a dark pub - in other words, things like copying the images into a reverse image search website is probably not in the spirit of The Ones That Got Away!
Questions 1 and 2
1) Googling allowed: what type of wave is this?
2) Googling allowed: what is the name of this object?
3) No more Googling! Identify the children's story (title only) from the quote: "And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world."
4) Identify the children's story (title only) from the quote: "He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones."
5) How many venues (stadia) are there for the 2014 FIFA World Cup?
6) To within 10%, what is the capacity of the largest-capacity stadium at the 2014 FIFA World Cup
7) Who is the president of the company Berkshire Hathaway?
8) To within 10%, what is the average lifespan of a red blood cell?
9) If I'm spending krona and visiting the Drottningholm Palace, which country am I in?
10) If I'm spending West African CFA francs and visiting Banco National Park, which country am I in?
The answers
1) Cyclops
2) A cake-breaker
3) The Jungle Book (by Rudyard Kipling)
4) The Princess and the Pea (by Hans Christian Andersen)
5) 12
6) 74,738 (so anywhere between 67,265 and 82,211 gets you the point - note that this is the FIFA figure specifically for the World Cup)
7) Warren Buffett
8) 120 days (so anywhere between 108 days and 132 days gets you the point)
9) Sweden
10) Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
The excuses
1) This 'you can use your phones' round was a nice twist I'd not encountered before in quizzing (although I had heard of it from other people). Despite searching for 'types of waves' we couldn't find anything that looked 'quite right' so went with our backup of 'pipeline'.
2) We went on a wild goose chase looking up types of 'comb', and I'd be interested to know if anyone got it without prior knowledge of the implement.
3) While both the doctor and I had read this book, it was many, many years ago. The 'strong white teeth' nudged us towards Little Red Riding Hood but with very little optimism.
4) With the benefit of hindsight "it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones" seems like a bit of a giveaway. I always find quotes/song lyrics a bit tough given that, really, one needs to scribble them down to allow for a proper think.
5) Given my World Cup geekery this was a frustrating miss. I had even been reading the Wikipedia page on the bid a few days previously, and also knew that Euro 2000 had eight stadia, but my mildly educated guess of 14 proved a bit too high.
6) Similarly frustrating as while I knew it was the Maracanã I rather foolishly got caught up in my memory of it hosting the 1950 World Cup 'Final' which saw a record (estimated) attendance of 210,000. (If you're not familiar with it, that Wikipedia page is well worth a read.)
7) A good example of why you should always have a guess. We incorrectly assumed, having never heard of Berkshire Hathaway, that this was going to be some Canada-specific question to which we would have no chance at the answer. Instead we should at least have thought to put down the world's wealthiest man rather than Wayne Gretzky.
8) The doctor strikes again with a surprisingly confident guess of 33 days.
9) We wrote down Sweden, then crossed it out and put Denmark. Krona of course puts one in mind of Scandinavia, but beyond that we were a touch lost, rather embarrassingly given that Drottningholm is ostensibly the Buckingham Palace of Sweden. I like to think if we'd heard the spelling (-holm) we might have had more faith in our original answer, but that's perhaps clutching at straws.
10) We wrote down Côte d'Ivoire, then crossed it out and put Congo (and in doing so a very cheeky bit of hedging in case it was one of the Republic of the Congo or the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Obviously 'West African Franc' put us in mind of former French colonies somewhere in the West, and on retrospect I should have really realized that while DRC and Congo both have borders on their west coasts, it's a little bit of a stretch to consider them West African. As it is, given the eight countries which use the currency, it was the national park that was arguably the real key to this one.
How did you do? Would you have beaten us and helped us win (1 or more correct)? Let us know with the poll below and then check out my alternative questions inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
My alternative questions
Yum!
1) Which 1991 movie, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, takes its name from the term for a place where waves hit a piece of land jutting out from the coastline?
2) The Austrian cake Sachertorte traditionally (and according to Mary Berry, of course) largely consists of chocolate sponge cake, dark chocolate icing, and what type of jam?
3) Two lines from Kipling's If— are written on the wall of the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon. To which two 'impostors' do they make reference?
4) Name a year during which Hans Christian Andersen was alive.
5) Four countries with populations of over ten million recognize Portugese as their official language. Two of these are Brazil and (you guessed it) Portugal. Name one of the others.
6) Essential trivia time: Rio de Janeiro (home of the Maracanã) translates to what in English?
7) Although most of my readers will be more familiar with The Apprentice as a vehicle for Alan Sugar, the franchise began in the United States where which American business magnate acts as the 'boss'?
8) Sometimes known as 'the royal disease', which condition was passed on by Queen Victoria to various royals across Europe?
9) Essential (but actually kinda fun!) trivia time: which Swedish village (whose name means 'outer village') lends its name to four chemical elements derived from a quarry there?
10) Côte d'Ivoire, predictably, takes its name from its historical trade of ivory. Which country to its east was, analogously, once called the Gold Coast?
The answers
1) Point Break
2) Apricot
3) Triumph and Disaster ("If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same")
4) 1805-1875
5) Mozambique and Angola (the other countries with Portugal as an official language are Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe)
6) January River
7) Donald Trump
8) Haemophilia
9) Ytterby (the elements are yttrium, erbium, terbium and ytterbium)
10) Ghana
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
New poll options should now be up and running - things are a bit ugly right now but you can hopefully not only tell the world how you scored on the Ones That Got Away, but also on my own alternative questions!
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 9: Well done, you beat us! 3+ out of 9: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer
The ones that got away
1) Two of the countries in this year's World Cup Finals have never won a World Cup Finals match. For one of these countries it is their first year appearing in the Finals, which is the other?
2) Which country will become the first to play 100 World Cup Finals matches in this year's tournament?
3) A Roman mixture of vinegar, honey and salt is the first known example of what?
4) Complete this quote from a TV show whose season finale aired (in the US) on Sunday night: "The night is dark..."
5) Two African countries have a capital city that means the same thing, one in English, the other in French. Name the two countries and the two capital cities. (You need all four for the point.)
6) Which company recently announced that it would allow its tech patents to be freely used worldwide "in the spirit of the open source movement"?
7) Film quotes! Name the movie and the character (or actor) who spoke it: "I'll be down in 2 shakes of a lamb's tail."
8) Film quotes again! Name the movie and the character (or actor) who spoke it: "Please get out of my Van Halen T-shirt before you jinx the band and they break up."
9) Which country is the world's biggest oil and gas producer?
The answers
1) Honduras (Bosnia and Herzegovina are this year's newbies)
2) Germany
3) Toothpaste
4) "...and full of terrors" (from Game of Thrones)
5) Libreville, Gabon, and Freetown, Sierra Leone
6) Tesla Motors
7) Mia Wallace (played by Uma Thurman) in Pulp Fiction. You need the movie and either the actor or character for the point.
8) Robbie Hart (played by Adam Sandler) in The Wedding Singer. You need the movie and either the actor or character for the point.
9) The USA
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more correct)? Let us know with the poll below, and then check out my alternative questions inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
The excuses
1) We correctly identified Bosnia and Herzegovina as the new team, but went with Iran who I should have remembered beat the USA in a group game in 1998.
2) Brazil, being the only team to have featured at every World Cup, was the 'obvious' answer, but I should have paid more attention to my niggling doubt about Germany.
3) A bit of a chestnut, but it completely slipped all of our minds. The doctor had a vague memory of Pliny the Elder concocting a cure for baldness (but it turns out that was something to do with sea urchins), which was eventually what we went with after what transpired to be a great deal of wasted time considering it being a hangover cure instead.
4) While we got as far as working out it was something to do with Game of Thrones, none of us have watched (or indeed, read) anything to do with it. The doctor offered "and Winter is coming" as being 'something to do with the show'.
5) I know, country capitals should be bread and butter, but I've got lazy with them. It was the doctor who managed three-quarters of the set, with Libreville, Freetown, and Sierra Leone, but I couldn't finish it off with Gabon. We went with Liberia (despite it seeming a bit on the nose), and naturally I remembered its capital (Monrovia) moments after handing in our sheet.
6) I had somehow picked up from Twitter that this was something to do with Elon Musk, but the only thing we knew about him was that he has something to do with PayPal.
7) Film quotes are seldom our forte, and there seemed very little way into this fairly unremarkable one.
8) This one we had slightly more of a feel for, with a toss-up between Wayne's World and School of Rock predictably proving fruitless.
9) I'm always a bit sceptical of questions like this, as what 'largest producer' means strikes me as something that needs a little more clarification. For example, Wikipedia lists the USA top for gas production, but only third for oil, with our answer (Russia) taking first and second spots respectively. A bit of googling suggests that a number of sources cite USA as "the largest producer of oil and gas", but I'll admit I'm still a little unsure as to how precisely this is defined.
My alternative questions
1) Honduras has historically (occasionally) been referred to as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, the former name of which modern-day country?
2) What is the product of the number of stars on Germany's football shirt and the number of stars on Brazil's football shirt?
3) Toothpaste played a role in another classic piece of trivia when, on September 22, 1955, it was the subject of the UK's first what?
4) Give any one of the four 'R' middle names in authors George R. R. Martin and John R. R. Tolkien's names.
5) Gabon lies on the Equator - hooray! But, along with Cameroon, which country does it border to its north which sadly - and perhaps surprisingly - doesn't lie on the Equator?
6) Nikola Tesla also lends his name to the SI unit for the strength of what?
7) An iconic mural by graffiti artist Banksy - since painted over by Transport for London workers - depicted a scene form Pulp Fiction with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching what instead of guns?
8) Which acting award has Adam Sandler won three times (the most recent coming in 2012 for That's My Boy), with only Sylvester Stallone ahead of him on four?
9) Some more classic/essential/boring trivia to finish: what do the letters in international organization OPEC stand for?
The answers
1) Belize
2) 15 (via 3 times 5; the stars represent the number of World Cups the teams have won)
3) Television advert (specifically, for S. R. Toothpaste)
4) Raymond Richard and Ronald Reuel (for Martin and Tolkien, respectively)
5) Equatorial Guinea (which does, however, straddle the Equator thanks to its island of Annobón which lies 155 kilometres south of the Equator while the rest of the country lies to the north)
6) Magnetic fields
7) Bananas (there is something of a story as to what happened next; it's probably easiest to search for 'Pulp Fiction' on Banksy's Wikipedia page)
8) Golden Raspberry (for Worst Actor, 'Razzie' also acceptable)
9) Organization (of the) Petroleum Exporting Countries
New! You can now tell the world how you did on my alternative questions too using the poll below!
Yes, it's the (men's) World Cup, and because I've been far too busy being far too excited about football this week I've not had time to do any pub quizzes. But fear not: instead of the usual quiz questions we got wrong, I've put together a quick World Cup Quiz. A mere four rounds (including pictures, naturally) I've tried to ask a mixture of things that are either interesting, or things that are boring but nevertheless essential trivia knowledge for all those World Cup questions quizmasters across the country will be asking over the next month. I'll have doubtless missed a bunch of obvious material so if you have any favourite football factoids do please let me know, either here or via Twitter @statacake!
Warming up
1) Which country both hosted and won the first World Cup in 1930?
2) Even non-fans know that Brazil are very good at winning the World Cup, but (prior to the 2014 competition) how many times have they won it?
3) Before this tournament, which player holds the record for most goals scored in World Cup Finals matches? Germany's Miroslav Klose is just one goal behind though, and has the chance to equal or even overhaul that record this year.
4) What was the final score in the only World Cup Final that really counts (1966)?
5) What is the official name of the current World Cup trophy?
The answers
1) Uruguay
2) Five
3) Ronaldo (the Brazilian one, with 15)
4) 4-2 (after extra time, to England, of course)
5) The FIFA World Cup Trophy (the Jules Rimet Trophy was awarded permanently to Brazil after their third title in 1970). I know this is a horrible question, but it's also the sort of question a mean quizmaster might smugly ask, so now you're prepared just in case.
Some stretches
1) The 2010 World Cup ball was criticized by some (especially goalkeepers) for being 'too round'. Meaning 'celebrate' in Zulu, what was that ball called?
2) England have participated in three penalty shootouts at the World Cup Finals and, you guessed it, have lost all of them. In the process seven England players have suffered the ignominy of missing a World Cup shootout penalty. Name five of them.
3) Complete this quote from Luis Suárez following his team's quarter-final victory in 2010: "The _____ now belongs to me".
4) The name 'Fuleco', chosen for the Armadillo mascot of this year's tournament, is a portmanteau of two Portugese words. What do these two words mean in English?
5) What was notable about the sequence of World Cup champions from 1970 to 1994, leading some pundits to suggest that England were 'destined' to win in 1998?
The answers
1) Jabulani
2) Stuart Pearce, Chris Waddle (against West Germany in 1990), Paul Ince, David Batty (1998 against Argentina), Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher (2006 against Portugal).
3) Hand of God (after he handled what would have been a last-minute winner for their opponents Ghana)
4) Football and ecology (from Futebol and Ecologia)
5) It was palindromic: Brazil, West Germany, Argentina, Italy, Argentina, West Germany, Brazil. If England had won in 1998 (reflecting their 1966 triumph) the sequence would have extended to include another four tournaments as Brazil's win in 2002 also mirrored their 1962 title. I often use this 'trick' to help me remember who won in which years.
Disciplinary matters
1) To date, five players have been sent off in a World Cup final, but which Frenchman was the most recent to receive this particular 'honour' for headbutting an opponent?
2) ...and who did he headbutt?
3) A mere three England players have been sent off during a World Cup Finals match. Name two of them.
4) A match in the 2006 finals earned the nickname 'The Battle of Nuremberg' after it saw a record four red cards and 16 yellow cards dished out. Name either of the teams involved (and no, Germany wasn't one of them).
5) Which year's World Cup Finals saw the first introduction of red and yellow cards in professional football? This is an important trivium to keep in mind for when a quizmaster asks "Who/when was the first player shown a red card in a World Cup Finals match?" instead of "Who/when was the first player sent off in a World Cup Finals match?"
The answers
1) Zinedine Zidane (against Italy in 2006)
2) Marco Materazzi
3) Ray Wilkins (1986), David Beckham (1998), Wayne Rooney (2006)
4) Portugal and the Netherlands
5) 1970 (in Mexico). In case you're wondering, the first red card was shown to Carlos Caszely of Chile in 1974, the first sending off was of Peru's Plácido Galindo in the first tournament in 1930.
Picture Round!
Finally, some pictures. Here are five World Cup mascots, can you match them up to their respective host countries? Any helpful wording has been expertly removed.
The answers
1) Germany (2006)
2) USA (1994)
3) Italy (1990)
4) Japan and South Korea (2002)
5) Germany (1974)
1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us! 5+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The engineer
4) The curler
The ones that got away
1) Which band had eight consecutive UK number one albums without releasing a single?
2) In psychology, who coined the terms introvert and extrovert?
3) In 1983 the Gavilan SC was the first computer described with what term?
4) Which film was the first to take more than $1 billion at the box office?
5) How many points are there on a backgammon board?
6) A temperature of 58°C, the hottest every recorded on Earth, was recorded in which continent?
7) The flag of which country was the first to be placed on the moon?
8) The term 'queen regent', as opposed to 'queen consort', refers to female monarchs who ruled on their own, rather than as the wife of a king. Since 1066, how many queens regent have there been of England (and later Britain)? These are those 'acknowledged' as queens regent. [This is as much clarification as we could get.]
The answers
1) Led Zeppelin
2) Carl Jung
3) Laptop
4) Titanic
5) 24
6) Africa (but this is a bit dubious; see our excuses below)
7) Soviet Union
8) 7 (again, see our excuses for clarification)
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (5 or more correct)? Blogger polls are (incredibly) still broken, so if you want to tell the world feel free to comment below or Tweet me @statacake!
Our excuses
1) After some debate we reluctantly went with Pink Floyd as a band who were spectacularly popular but perhaps didn't have music that lent itself to single releases. However, this week the doctor failed to heed the 'say everything that crosses your mind' warning, as "oh bugger, I thought of Led Zeppelin but didn't say it" prompted the inevitable "dude, I would have known that was right!". One day we'll learn.
2) Mea culpa. We decided our options were Freud or Jung, and I thought that Jung would be 'too hard for this quiz'. Sorry guys.
3) To make up for that last blunder, I was quite keen on laptop here but at the last minute someone suggested the SC might stand for 'supercomputer', so we went with that. Grr.
4) Apparently we don't have a great grasp of money, as we thought it must have been a fairly recent film to make that much. Our guess of Avatar has the distinction of being the first film to take two billion dollars, so I'm going to pretend that means we were close.
5) This is not the first occasion I've been asked this question in a quiz, but I think the last time it happened we got it right. Most of the team independently came up with 32 which seemed about right, but for future reference I'm just going to remember that the number 12 is often a reliable basis for these sorts of things.
6) This is either a trick question, or an incorrect one, as the record in question was de-certified by the World Meteorological Organization in 2012. The actual record seems to be held by Death Valley in California which, to add insult to (quizzing) injury, was precisely what we suspected.
7) Apparently the Soviets crashed a rocket carrying their flag into the moon in 1959. The doctor suggested "they might have fired one from a t-shirt cannon from a satellite", and on retrospect we should perhaps have had more faith in the argument "why would you even ask this if it was just the USA?".
8) Hugely frustrating, and a good example of why I think asking questions along the lines of "how many monarchs..." have to be done very carefully. We identified five women who were unambiguously queens in the own right: Mary I, Elizabeth I, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II, but that left Matilda and Lady Jane Grey as disputed claimants, as well as Mary II who co-ruled with William III, but not merely as a consort. On checking my facts for this write-up, I've also discovered that the term is queen regnant (not regent), and that according to this list, at least, the 'actual' number is eight. However, depending on how you consider Matilda, Jane and Mary, the answer could also be five, six or seven. If there are any royal terminology experts reading who can correct/clarify this, I'd be all ears, but for now at least this seems like something you should be very wary of asking.
My alternative questions
1) The original having heavily featured for much of the show's run, a drum and bass remix of Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' was the theme tune of which long-running BBC program from 1998 to 2003?
2) Popular in online 'personality tests', the Myers-Briggs psychometric questionnaire identifies 16 psychological 'types' via four pairs (or dichotomies) of type preference, each identified by a letter. One pair is Extroversion (E) and Introversion (I), and another is Sensing (S) and Intuition (N). What type, beginning with F, pairs with Thinking, and what type, beginning with P, pairs with Judging, to complete the set?
3) The term 'smartphone' first appeared in 1997, when which Swedish telecommunications company (whose name is perhaps more familiar in conjunction with that of a Japanese multinational) described its GS 88 'Penelope' as such?
4) While the sinking of the Titanic took some 1,500 lives, the sinking of which (far less well-known) passenger ferry in 1987 is thought to be the world's deadliest peacetime maritime disaster, with an estimated 4,386 deaths?
5) In backgammon you get extra moves if you roll a double (the same number on both dice). Assuming the dice are fair, what's the probability of rolling a double?
6) Despite being the first to ratify the US Constitution, which is the only US state to not have a national park?
Question 7
7) With obvious similarities to that of the Soviet Union, pictured is the flag of Transnistria, a breakaway state located within which European country?
8) Traditionally the direction British monarchs face on coins alternates with each succession. Which king bucked this trend, preferring portraits of himself looking to the left, the same direction as his predecessor?
Back in October I put up a post addressing the regular complaint that Only Connect's missing vowels round is 'overpowered' using data from the first seven series of the show. A mere six months after it concluded I thought I'd stick up a quick summary of how adding Series 8's data affected things. The answer? Not much. Still, read on for the latest Only Connect missing vowels stats (until Series 9 finishes in a couple of months and I end up doing it all again).
Turnabout's fair play
For me, the headline statistic when it comes to the importance of missing vowels is turnarounds: how often does a team come from behind after the walls to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Across the first seven regular series of Only Connect - comprising 99 episodes - 14 teams achieved this feat. Series 8 added three to this total, taking us to 17 turnarounds in 112 shows, or about twice every 13 episodes. There have still only been four occasions where teams were tied after the walls. (For the extra-curious, all three of the new additions took place in the first four episodes of Series 8, with the Lasletts and the Bakers overturning single-point deficits to defeat the Pilots and Press Gang, respectively, while my team the Board Gamers came back from three behind to overtake the Globetrotters.)
Series 4's Radio Addicts, one of just three teams
to turn around a post-wall deficit of four points.
Unsurprisingly, this hasn't changed another important stat: the biggest missing vowels comeback remains a relatively meagre four points, with this having been accomplished just three times in the show's history. My team was the third to turn things around from three points behind, while four teams have managed a 2-point turnaround. Over half of all the missing vowels comebacks have been from just 1 point behind. If missing vowels is an elaborate scheme to help quick-fingered teams win, it's not a very successful one.
Swing when you're winning
Points swings per round: how much the
team that wins a round will win it by.
A new statistic I thought I'd look at this time is points 'swings' per round: when a team wins a round, how many points they win that round by. This gives a sense of 'volatility': how many points the
better team might claw back, or extend their lead by, in each of the
four rounds. Doing this we get the table on the right where (for example) we see that on an 'average' episode one team will score about 2.6 more points than the other in the connections round, 3.4 on sequences, 2.4 on the walls, and 4.2 on missing vowels. (For the sake of completeness, the relevant standard deviations tell a near-identical story.)
Of obvious note is the missing vowels swing: on average the team which wins that round will win it by more than any other, albeit by less than one point over sequences. However, the fact that missing vowels so seldom makes a difference to the final outcome of a match suggests that while on average one team will score about 4 points more than their opponents in this round, they will usually either be so far ahead - or behind - that it doesn't matter. Missing vowels has the potential to cause big upsets, but only if one team is exceptionally good at them while simultaneously being rubbish at the rest of the show. Moreover, with so little to choose between the four rounds in absolute terms, the same could be really be said of any of them. (Plus, ultimately, like-for-like comparisons such as this are tricky given the fundamentally different nature of scoring between the rounds.)
Summing up
Finally, an update to the average points per round stats. As the table below shows, Series 8 doesn't stand out at all, with the overall averages largely unchanged (desipte my team's best efforts to drag the walls average down...).
Average points scored (by both teams) per round on Only Connect Series 1-8. (Click for big.)
That's your lot. In short: the missing vowels round is still nowhere near as overpowered as plenty of people seem to think: over 80% of the time it makes no difference to a show's outcome, and even then it will likely only see a one point deficit overturned.
