Each week, quiz obsessives and Only Connect champions
Jamie Karran (@NoDrNo) and Michael Wallace (@statacake) take on the pub quizzes of the world.
Find out every Friday if you could have helped with the questions they got wrong.
Thursday 29 October 2015
The Clash only had one UK top ten single
Your targets this week:
We won this week, but could you have done even better? The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The secret German 4) The metallurgist 5) The rich-person otherkin 6) The ringer
The ones that got away 1) The Clash song Rock the Casbah was inspired by the post-1979 ban on Western music in what country? 2) The building 'Blok P' was reportedly home to over 1% of the population in what autonomous country? 3) The animal Ursus arctos horribilis is better known by what name? 4)2 point question: On January 25th, 1979, Robert William became the first person in history to be killed by what? 5)2 point question: Excluding any spaces or punctuation, name country with exactly 14 letters in its name (and to simulate the quiz experience, you should only allow yourself a maximum of 5 minutes).
The answers
1) Iran 2) Greenland 3) Grizzly bear 4) A robot 5) Papua New Guinea or Solomon Islands
The doctor's excuses
1) We all independently thought that the Casbah had a connection to Morocco. Annoyingly multiple of us, if we had thought to question the first thing that more than one person liked, would have suggested a second-guess of Iran - based on the revolution in 1979 that brought the Ayatollah to power and trapped Ben Affleck in a building with an Argos catalogue... or something. 2) We didn't realise Blok was spelled Blok and not Block. So we weren't even thinking in the right area of Europe. We reasoned that the term "autonomous country" rather than just "country" was a clue to the fact that it was something weird like the Vatican. In actual fact Vatican City is simply an "independent state". 3) We thought we "knew" that the grizzly was Ursus horribilis, but in fact it turns out that the horribilis part is it's subspecies, in taxonomic terms, so there effectively is no such animal as Ursus horribilis. All this is just to say that we missed that it was the mainland grizzly and instead put "kodiak bear", which is Ursus arctos middendorffi (boringly just named after some guy). At least we avoided the trap of thinking it was the polar bear - Ursus maritimus. 4) Since anaesthetics is a field that progresses quite rapidly, we thought that lethal injection might be relatively recent, since it's *sort* of just someone doing a normal anaesthetic and then, being all WHOOPS POISON! It is pretty recent actually... having been first used in 1982, but still wrong. In future I'm just going to try to remember "Robert was killed by a robot" 5) This was an extremely high pressure quiz since it was the final of a tournament which had being going on for 6 months. As such, there was a lot going on as the final paper was handed in and mistakes were made (the passive voice means it was nobody's fault!). Czechoslovakia is obviously not a country any more, and is thus a wrong answer... but it does have the right number of letters, so it's swings and roundabouts really.
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!
Our alternative questions 1)2 point question: Here are the first lines of two books purportedly banned in Iran. For 1 point each, name the novel:
a) "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
b) "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die." 2) Greenland may be considered the least densely populated country in the world, but what Asian country is the least densely populated UN member state? 3)2 point question: Which fictional bear's name derives from that of a Canadian provincial capital? For a second point, name any other Canadian provincial capital. 4) Robert William's death on January 25th coincided with the day of celebration of what other Robert? 5) What 'constitutional union' of 14 letters long would have been another bad answer to this question, as it ceased to exist 97 years ago?
The answers
1) a) The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) and b) The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) 2) Mongolia 3) Winnie-the-Pooh (after Winnipeg), other capitals are St. John's, Halifax, Fredericton, Charlottetown, Quebec, Toronto and Regina 4) Burns 5) Austria-Hungary
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
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