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 16 October 2014
IKEA carpets are typically named after places in Denmark
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 10: Well done, you beat us! 5+ out of 10: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees 1) The statistician 2) The doctor 3) The anthropologist 4) The other anthropologist
The ones that got away 1) In what year was the pink ribbon first adopted as the official symbol of Breast Cancer Awareness Month? 2)2 point question! The oral contraceptive raises the risk of breast cancer and which two others? (1 point each!) 3) Which of these authors never fought in an actual war: Ernest Hemingway, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. G. Wells or Leo Tolstoy?
Question 7
4) Three films share the honour of most Oscar wins with 11. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Titanic are the two most recent, what's the other? 5) What is the best-selling fictional novel in history? 6) Which of these was invented via a misunderstanding: the tea bag, Plexiglas (i.e. safety glass), the match, or penicillin? 7) Name the country from its outline (pictured); its name is something of a misnomer. 8) Which US president, on a visit to Poland, was mistranslated as saying "I desire the Poles carnally"? 9) What do the following have in common: IKEA furniture, a jury, and News Team!?
The answers
1) 1992 2) Liver and cervical 3) H. G. Wells (Hemingway and Tolkien participated in the First World War, Tolstoy in the Crimean war) 4) Ben-Hur 5) Both A Tale of Two Cities and Don Quixote were accepted 6)The tea bag 7) Venezuela (meaning 'little Venice', although there's some debate) 8) Jimmy Carter 9) They can all be assembled (the last being a reference to Anchorman)
Our excuses
1) Figuring this would be later than the use of the red ribbon for AIDS awareness, but still seeming like something that had been around forever, we thought the early nineties were a good bet. Alas, while our train of thought was accurate, we got off slightly late and went with 1993. 2) Good work from the doctor as always, who plumped for ovarian and endometrial. The truth is, of course, rather complicated. 3) We were fairly sure Tolkien and Hemingway had been involved in the First World War, but decided the 'red herring' of Tolstoy's War and Peace was too tempting to pass up. 4) Some fairly classic trivia went begging here. We went with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which, being one of three movies to win the 'Big Five' Academy Awards, seemed at least a reasonable bet. (Unfortunately, it didn't win any others.) 5) This one seems at least a little bit debatable, as unsurprisingly no-one's really all that sure how many copies of Don Quixote (first published in 1605) have been sold. Without much hope we went with the Harry Potter option (namely, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), but with 'only' 107 million copies sold it comes in fourth on the all-time list behind The Little Prince (140 million), The Lord of the Rings (150 million) and A Tale of Two Cities (200 million). 6) Only able to rule out penicillin with any certainty, we had a bit of meta-game fail here as we incorrectly supposed that Plexiglas seemed an unlikely option to include if it wasn't the answer. On retrospect I had heard about the tea bag story (samples of tea that were meant to be taken out of the bags they were packaged in) but it clearly evaded me on the night. 7) My main excuse here is that this question was one of the last of the evening and we were given about a minute to think about it before the sheets were taken in. I'm usually quite good at country outlines (after a long run with a pub quiz in the UK which would have one every week) but they can take a bit of time to figure out. I'd got as far as deducing there was probably a body of water to the north (from which there really aren't very many options to work through) but didn't have the time to get much further than that. 8) With little to go on we took the 'safe' option of George W. Bush (thinking that's what most other teams would put even if they didn't know the answer). 9) Groan. I imagine if you get the Anchorman reference then this works out nicely, but we were left struggling with just the other two clues (and eventually went with 'instructions').
How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (5 or more)? 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!
My alternative questions 1) Charity/disease awareness ribbons come in a remarkable array of colours, but what disease was originally symbolized by a clear ribbon to reflect air and it often going unnoticed by others? It later switched to pearl/white-coloured ribbons because, in an unfortunate (but predictable) twist, clear ribbons were difficult to see. 2) Derived from the latin 'quater die sumentus', how often should you take a drug if your doctor has scribbled 'q.d.s' on your prescription? 3) Which actor and director, perhaps best known for Citizen Kane, narrated the infamous 1938 radio drama adaptation of The War of the Worlds? 4) Earlier this year Disney's Frozen joined a long list of (fully) animated movies to win how many Oscars, the most for any animated film? 5) Seamless link alert: the two titular cities in Dickens' novel are London and Paris. Published in 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London is, despite being a memoir, the first full-length work by which author? 6) Classic trivia: suggesting it could be drunk prior to eating food, what did the letters PG in the tea brand PG Tips originally stand for? 7)2 point question! Venezuela and Ecuador are the only two South American members of a specific international economic group, half of whose current members are in the Middle East. For 1 point: give the 4-letter initialism of this group. For a bonus point: give the full name. 8) The John F. Kennedy quote "Ich bin ein Berliner" is often incorrectly described as translating to "I am a doughnut". In Berlin the doughnut in question would be known as a 'Pfannkuchen', which translates to what seven letter English word? 9) In an apparent parody of Apple's notoriously over-the-top adverts, IKEA released a video describing its 2015 catalogue as "not a digital book, or an e-book" but a what?
The answers
1)Lung cancer 2) 4 times a day 3)Orson Welles 4) 2 (Frozen won Best Animated Feature and Best Original song, the latter being a common scalp for Disney movies: between 1989 and 1995 the studios took home five such gongs) 5)George Orwell 6) Pre-Gest (post-war labelling regulations meant companies could no longer market tea as a digestive aid) 7) OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries for the bonus point) 8) Pancake 9)A bookbook
How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll, and don't forget the 2-point question!
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