There are approximately 1.25 people per square mile in Alaska

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!
2+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer
4) The chemical engineer

The ones that got away

Question 6

1) What did the 'Two Plus Four Agreement' concern?
2) In what year was the Sino-Indian War?
3) What was the capital of Portugal between 1808 and 1821?
4) How much (in US dollars) did the USA pay Russia for Alaska in 1867?
5) In the context of stock markets, in which year did Black Monday take place?
6) Which country previously used this flag (pictured)?
For questions 7 and 8, find two words of the given length that create a 'chain' from the first to the last. For example, if the puzzle read

PLAYING

_ _ _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _

MAT

Then the first missing word could be 'FIELD' and the next 'MOUSE' to create the chain PLAYING FIELD, FIELD MOUSE, MOUSE MAT. You need both for the point. Got it? Good. (Now imagine a quizmaster trying to explain this in the final round of the night...)
7)

FLANK

_ _ _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _

MUSIC

8)

BABY

_ _ _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

NIGHT

The answers

1) The reunification of Germany
2) 1962
3) Rio de Janeiro
4) $7.2 million (and yes, you apparently had to get that spot on)
5) 1987, although 1929 was also acceptable, and looking at this page suggests that quite a lot of other answers are also valid, but in true pub quiz style, the QM is always right...
6) South Africa
7) STEAK and HOUSE
8) GRAND and OPENING

Poll results: 30 votes. 22 of you did better than us of which 13 would have helped us win! The average voter scored 1.4/8.

The excuses

1) This rang the very faintest of bells with me, but our American member suggested it might have been something to do with Canada acquiring land (perhaps two territories and four provinces at one point) which was the most plausible thing we could come up with. On retrospect one of those things that is falls right into the historical blind spot for our generation, being too recent to have studied in school, but not in living memory.
2) I was pretty sure this was somewhere between 1950 and 1970, but a teammate suggested it was much older. A wild guess of 1863 put us almost exactly 100 years out, which is kinda fun.
3) Oof. An absolute corker of a trivia chestnut and it completely passed me by. I've definitely heard this one before but it didn't even cross my mind.
4) Perhaps this seems fairer to a North American crowd, but with an American and a Canadian in our quartet we were still completely lost.
5) I immediately wrote down the Wall Street Crash year 1929 but was fairly confidently corrected by a teammate as that being Black Tuesday, not Monday. Instead he mooted a more recent date, before eventually landing on 2008 which, it turns out, is one of the few years not to have some sort of Black Monday.
6) Horrible miss from my perspective given how much time I've spent reading about flags (including historical ones). After discussing the colours and the presence of the Union Jack we eventually settled on India, with me mis-remembering an old University Challenge 'mistake' about the East India Company's flag and confusing it with the Dutch counterpart (because of the orange). In case you're wondering, the flags in the middle represent the former British colonies of Cape of Good Hope and Natal.
7-8) With these questions alongside similar puzzles in a regular round (rather than, as one might expect in a British quiz, on a picture sheet) time pressure played a big part, but I was still disappointed given my interest and experience in word games. I'll admit that 'flank steak' is not a phrase I remember encountering, while 'baby grand' seems tough to pull out of nowhere, but I don't doubt some of you will have spotted these immediately.

The alternative questions
1) A boring, but essential piece of trivia: what was the capital city of West Germany?
2) Which two countries are bordered only by India and China?
3) Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue was considered the largest Art Deco statue in the world until 2010, when Christ the King was built in which European country?

Question 4

4) The flag of Alaska (pictured), designed by 13-year-old Benny Benson for a 1927 competition, features the North Star and which asterism in the constellation Ursa Major?
5) While The Wolf of Wall Street didn't pick up the Best Picture award at this years Oscars, it did mark the seventh film starring Leonardo DiCaprio to be nominated for the prize. Name three of the others.
6) The flag of South Africa was previously notable as the only national flag with six colours (ignoring those with fiddly little crests and whatnot that always spoil these sorts of questions). But since 2011 which other African country also has a flag with (approximately) the same six colours?
7) House music traces its origins to which American city, also notable for its Willis Tower (though you may know it by another name)?
8) Another trivia classic to finish: how many keys on a standard grand piano? (And if that's too easy, you can nab a bonus point if you can tell me how many of them are white.)

The answers

1) Bonn
2) Nepal and Bhutan
3) Poland (it was funded by donations from residents of the town)
4) The Big Dipper or The Plough (an asterism is a pattern of stars, rather than a fully-fledged constellation)
5) Titanic, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Inception, Django Unchained (Titanic and The Departed won)
6) South Sudan
7) Chicago (Willis Tower still often referred to as Sears Tower)
8) 88 (52 white, 36 black)

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