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 15 May 2014
Olympic gold medals must be at least 92.5% silver
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us! 4+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
The ones that got away
Question 8
1) Summer Olympic sports are divided into categories based on their popularity and revenue generating potential. Three sports are currently Category A, meaning they are the most popular: athletics, aquatics and which other?
2) Only one Asian athlete has ever won an Olympic medal in a sprint event: which country did they represent?
3) After the Summer Olympics and the Football World Cup, which sporting event sees the world's third-largest television audience?
4) Which year is significant for lovers of English poetry because it saw the publication of six odes by John Keats?
5) Which famous musician supposedly believed the US government deliberately infected people of African origin with AIDS to weaken them?
6) According to a conspiracy theory that first emerged in the late 60s, the death of which member of the Beatles was covered up by the use of a lookalike?
7) The Montauk Project is an alleged series of secret US government projects conducted for the purposes of developing what?
8) Who's this famous author?
The answers
1) Gymnastics
2) Sri Lanka (but this is mildly contentious; see below)
3) The Cricket World Cup
4) 1819
5) Kanye West
6) Paul McCartney
7) Time travel, mind control, 'psychological warfare' (or something along those lines)
8) Lewis Carroll
Poll results: 39 votes. 36 of you did better than us of which just 1 would
have helped us win! The average voter scored 2.5/8.
The excuses
1) On retrospect, probably the obvious answer, but we didn't even think of it. We went with cycling (given the vast number of events and sell-out crowds), but suspect we were at least in part being influenced by Team GB's recent successes in that field.
2) Assuming that 110m hurdles counted as a 'sprint' event, I went with China as I knew of Liu Xiang's exploits. Apparently, however, it doesn't, with various sources suggesting this is limited to the 100m, 200m and 400m races. Grr.
3) A toss-up between the Super Bowl and the correct answer, we naively assumed cricket would seem an incredibly tough ask in a Canadian quiz. (It also seems a very tricky question to really justify, or indeed phrase accurately, but that's the authentic Ones That Got Away experience you've come to love!)
4) I can only assume this is some incredibly famous piece of trivia that completely escaped our combined minds. Indeed, the fact the doctor's guess was 1867, and mine was 1841, when Keats died in 1821, doesn't really suggest we're too hot on our Romantic poets.
5) This rang a bell but we couldn't place it.
6) Initially we thought it would make sense for it to be one of the two still extant Beatles and wrote down McCartney. Then we 'cleverly' worked out it would make even more sense if it was John Lennon.
7) We (apparently correctly) thought this had something to do with the Philadelphia Experiment, which we (also apparently correctly) thought was to do with invisibility. If this was our Quizzing GCSE we'd have at least got follow-through marks.
8) I strongly recognized the picture (although I've no idea why) but after drawing a blank we took the 'North American author' approach to quizzing and put F Scott Fitzgerald. (Although I was tempted by Alan Davies.)
The alternative questions
1) In the all around events at the Summer Olympics, female gymnasts compete across four disciplines (or pieces of apparatus) - name all four.
2) How many hurdles does a runner face in the Olympics 110m hurdles event?
3) Excluding aggregated figures from repeat showings, the 1996 Christmas episode of which sitcom is the most watched non-documentary programme of all time in the UK?
4) It's a well-established fact that people at most know the first or last two lines of famous poems. Which five words start the penultimate line of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, being followed by "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"?
5) The name first proposed in 1982 to describe cases of what is now known as AIDS was GRID. The I and D stood for 'immune deficiency', what do the G and R stand for?
6) For which Bond film did Paul McCartney and Wings record the (totally radical) theme song?
7) Known in her homeland as Princess Diana of Themyscira, which DC superhero is often seen flying an invisible aeroplane?
8) Before publishing as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the title of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript instead put her adventures where?
The answers
1) Vault, uneven bars, balance beam, floor
2) Ten
3) Only Fools and Horses
4) Beauty is truth, truth beauty
5) Gay-related
6) Live and Let Die
7) Wonder Woman
8) Under Ground
And for what it's worth, Japan got bronze in the 4x100m in Beijing. And that's definitely known as the "sprint relay", so four more athletes have medals. Dodgy question in my opinion, you got unlucky!
Awesome fact, thanks. And yeah, I sometimes feel bad about putting up questions where the quizmaster has arguably made a bit of a hash of things, but I can only trust people crave authenticity!
As a former junior international sprinter, I'm astounded that 110mh isn't counted as a sprint event.. Went for Liu Xiang too.
ReplyDeleteAnd for what it's worth, Japan got bronze in the 4x100m in Beijing. And that's definitely known as the "sprint relay", so four more athletes have medals. Dodgy question in my opinion, you got unlucky!
ReplyDeleteAwesome fact, thanks. And yeah, I sometimes feel bad about putting up questions where the quizmaster has arguably made a bit of a hash of things, but I can only trust people crave authenticity!
DeleteI only got two of the Ones That got Away, but scored 6 on your alternatives. *happy dance*
ReplyDeleteNice - anything above zero on the Ones That Got Away indicates success in my book :)
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