Thursday 5 June 2014

In the board game, 'backgammon' refers to a particularly overwhelming victory

Your targets this week:

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


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


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?

The answers

6 comments:

  1. 2 and 7. Pink Floyd, of course, had a (slightly inexplicable) Christmas #1 with Another Brick in the Wall, part II. And also never had eight successive number one albums, much as I would have liked them to. (Did Led Zeppelin release US singles but not UK, or something? Or am I making that up?)

    (I'm glad to see you're making Proper Canadian Friends. Do you also have one who owns a pet moose? :D)

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    1. Oh, nice Pink Floyd fact, I wasn't aware of that (despite my occasional attempts to (re)learn Christmas number ones). Led Zeppelin apparently had a specific thing for not releasing UK singles, which was (obviously) news to us.

      No moose-owning Canadians yet, alas :(

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  2. I got 4 right. I picked Led Zepplin, as I knew they had a policy of not releasing singles in the UK. I guessed Jung, as I didn't associate 'introvert' and 'extrovert' with what I know of Freud's work. I haven't played backgammon in a while, but thought six points per side of each half seemed right, and multiplied by four. I dimly remembered about the Russians firing something containing their flag at the moon and getting it there before the Americans landed.

    I also thought of Death Valley for the highest temperature, and didn't know whether to include Matilda and Lady Jane Gray among the queens.

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    1. Nice score - your thinking on Freud is similar to that of at least one of the team on the night, we were (or at least I was) just lacking a bit of assuredness on that front.

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  3. 4 correct also. Unlucky about those two awkwardly phrased and/or sourced questions in Q6 and Q8; I recently was asked the 'highest temperature on Earth' question as part of a pub quiz, and having spent an afternoon dawdling round Wikipedia looking at extreme temperatures I was sure it was Death Valley, same pitfall as you suffered I'm afraid. Monarchs I'm not too hot on at the moment, but still quite a tricky question to get with the matter of co-rulers and the like.

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    1. Nice score to you also :) I almost feel I should apologize for the Death Valley and queens questions, but such is the authentic quiz night experience I try to recreate here...

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