World Quizzing Championship practice set

OK, with less than two weeks to go until the 2015 World Quizzing Championship, I've written a mini practice set consisting of five questions from each of the usual WQC genres.

Only forty questions, but hopefully it'll provide a bit of revision and learning material for people, and hopefully you enjoy the questions!

Here goes - answers for all the categories are at the end:

Media

1 The title character in Miguel Ángel Asturias' novel, El Señor Presidente, is said to have been inspired by which Guatemalan dictator, in power from 1898 to 1920?

2 Which 2014 film won three Academy Awards, including that of Best Supporting Actor for JK Simmons?

3 The 1978 work A Contract with God is credited with popularising the term “graphic novel”. Which American cartoonist created it?

4 Which Swedish-speaking Finnish novelist was best known for her creation of the Moomin books for children?

5 Paraguay has two official languages. One, quite predictably, is Spanish; sharing its name with the country's currency, what is the other? 

Culture

1 Krzywy Domek, which is Polish for “crooked little house”, is an irregularly shaped building in which seaside town on the coast of the Baltic Sea?

2 Supposedly coming from an Akkadian word meaning “to build on a raised area”, what name was given to the structures built in Mesopotamia that took the form of step-pyramids on successive receding levels? The most famous was that at the city of Ur.

3 French poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined which term in 1912 to describe the offshoot of cubism that involved brighter colours and greater abstraction? Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and his wife, Sonia, were the main exponents.

4 The artist Louise Bourgeois was best known for her sculptures of which creatures? Her largest such work, Maman, stands at over thirty feet tall.

5 Arising out of avidya (ignorance) and characterised by dukkha (suffering), which concept in Buddhism refers to the cycle of birth and rebirth?

Entertainment

1 “The Gnome”, “The Old Castle”, “Cattle”, and “The Hut on Fowl's Legs” are movements in which suite of 1874 by Modest Mussorgsky?

2 Which world music record label was established by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne in 1988?

3 Created by Jenji Kohan and based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, which US comedy-drama series first released on Netflix in 2013 centres around life in a women's prison?

4 The Algerian singer-songwriter Khaled is known as the “king” of which musical genre that originated in his country from the music of Bedouin shepherds?

5 A 1908 novel by Valery Bryusov was the inspiration for a Sergei Prokofiev opera which first premiered in 1955. What title was shared by both the novel and the opera?

History

1 Which city served as the capital of the Inca Empire from 1438 to 1533?

2 Who led the Russian Empire at the 1812 Battle of Borodino?

3 Which US Army general commanded military operations in the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1972, at a time when US troop strength in South Vietnam fell from 543,000 to around 49,000?

4 Which South American country fought a war from 1864 to 1870 against a so-called Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay?

5 Commonly referred to as Africa's Che Guevara, which Burkinabé military captain was behind the name change of Burkina Faso from Upper Volta, and served as president of the country from 1983 to 1987 prior to his assassination in a coup d'état?

Lifestyle

1 “Eat fresh” is the slogan of which US fast-food franchise that has over 43,000 outlets in over 100 countries worldwide?

2 Zara is the flagship retailer (others include Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Massimo Dutti) of which Spanish clothing conglomerate, the largest fashion group in the world, that was co-founded by Amancio Ortega – now Spain's richest man – in 1985?

3 Cachupa, a slow-cooked stew of corn, beans, and fish or meat, is regarded as the national dish of which island country?

4 Which fitness program that has achieved worldwide popularity, incorporating elements of dance and aerobics, was founded by Beto Perez in Colombia in 2001?

5 The disorder known as plantar fasciitis affects which general part of the body?

Sciences

1 One of the rarest mammals on earth, it is restricted to north-eastern Madagascar. The silky sifaka is what type of animal?

2 Which chemical element, the second-most abundant in the earth's crust, has atomic number 14 and a name from the Latin for “hard stone”?

3 Which US physicist is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, and then again in 1972 for a theory of superconductivity?

4 The alligator family is made up of two sub-families. One, unsurprisingly, is the alligator itself; which group of relatively small crocodilians native to Central and South America and Australia comprises the other?

5 Which Swedish botanist, known as the father of modern taxonomy, gives his name to the system of binomial nomenclature still in use today?

Sport & Games

1 India has won every edition of the World Cup held in this sport to date; what is the national sport of Bangladesh and Nepal?

2 Which Italian mountaineer is known for having been the first person to ascend Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, and for being the first person to ascend all fourteen “eight-thousander” mountain peaks (peaks over 8,000m above sea level)?

3 Who has been Test and ODI captain for the Sri Lanka national cricket team since February 2013?

4 Upon winning the 2010 French Open singles title, she became the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam singles title. With a career-high world no. 4 ranking achieved in early 2011, which tennis player is this?

5 Which French swimmer and three-time Olympic medallist tragically died in the 2015 Villa Castelli helicopter collision while filming for a reality TV show?

World

1 Which major US city, the most populous in its state, has been home to the world's busiest airport by passenger traffic since 1998, is home to the headquarters of The Coca-Cola Company, and held a major sporting event in 1996?

2 Divided into 100 sen, what is the currency of Malaysia?

3 The first flyby is predicted to occur in mid-July this year; what is the name of the NASA space probe launched to study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons?

4 Which strait – on which Balikpapan and Palu are ports - separates the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi?

5 Which Australian serial entrepreneur is regarded as the most prolific inventor in the world, given that he has over 9,000 patents registered worldwide? His main fields of invention include electronics and the internet. 

Answers:

Media

1 Manuel Estrada Cabrera

2 Whiplash

3 Will Eisner

4 Tove Jansson

5 Guarani

Culture

1 Sopot

2 Ziggurat

3 Orphism

4 Spiders

5 Samsara

Entertainment

1 Pictures at an Exhibition

2 Luaka Bop

3 Orange Is the New Black

4 Raï

5 The Fiery Angel

History

1 Cusco

2 Mikhail Kutuzov

3 Creighton Abrams

4 Paraguay

5 Thomas Sankara

Lifestyle

1 Subway

2 Inditex

3 Cape Verde

4 Zumba

5 Foot

Sciences

1 Lemur

2 Silicon

3 John Bardeen

4 Caiman

5 Carl Linnaeus

Sport & Games

1 Kabaddi

2 Reinhold Messner

3 Angelo Mathews

4 Francesca Schiavone

5 Camille Muffat

World

1 Atlanta

2 Ringgit

3 New Horizons

4 Makassar Strait

5 Kia Silverbrook

HEY. I'm still here.

Can't believe my last post on here was over a month ago. Seem to have been busy with all sorts of stuff: uni work (honest), filming UC (there'll be a long post coming on that once it's started airing, about the whole experience and how we've done), doing some quizzes. Unfortunately my quiz-writing rate - certainly for the blog and my own learning - has reduced to very little. So now I aim to write a lot more on here, with at least one new post a week.

Two quizzes today - they are as follows:

First quiz is on Nobel laureates:

1 The element with atomic number 109 is named after which Austrian physicist, the only woman other than Marie Curie to have had a chemical element named after her?

2 Which Russian-American poet and essayist received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature for, according to the official citation, "an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity"?

3 In how many different categories are the Nobel prizes awarded?

4 Norwegian Ragnar Frisch and Dutch Jan Tinbergen were the inaugural winners of which of the Nobel prizes?

5 Winning it in 1956 and 1972, who is the first and so far only person to have received the Nobel Prize for Physics twice? 

6 Which Austrian physicist, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology, was considered one of the founders of ethology, and wrote books including King Solomon's Ring and Man Meets Dog?

7 Max Theiler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for his development of a vaccine against which disease, subsequently becoming the first African-born Nobel laureate?

8 Swiss businessman Henry Dunant was joint-laureate of the first ever Nobel Peace Prize for his founding of the International Red Cross, which he was inspired to do after witnessing the fighting at which 1859 battle?

9 Bangladeshi entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his founding of which micro-finance organisation which specialises in giving small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral?

10 Which contemporary Chinese writer was set to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature but died before he could be awarded it?

Answers:

1 Lise Meitner

2 Joseph Brodsky

3 Six

4 Economic Sciences

5 John Bardeen

6 Konrad Lorenz

7 Yellow fever

8 Solferino

9 Grameen Bank

10 Shen Congwen

Second quiz is on European geography:

1 Which city of north-western Spain is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia?

2 Which of Europe's major rivers - the longest of Ukraine and Belarus - flows through Kiev and Dnipropetrovsk?

3 The islands of Ischia, Procida, Nisida, and Vivara - and sometimes Capri - all comprise which archipelago of southern Italy?

4 Kopavogur, with a population of around 32,000, is the second-largest settlement in which European country?

5 Forming part of the boundary between Europe and Asia, the Bosphorus is the world's narrowest strait used for international navigation. It connects the Black Sea with which inland sea, known in classical antiquity as the Propontis?

6 Which Greek island, lying in the shadow of its much larger neighbour, Crete, is the country's most southerly, and also marks the southernmost point of Europe?

7 The flag of which partially recognised European state consists of three horizontal bands of white, red, and yellow?

8 The Tatra mountains form a natural border between Slovakia and which other European country?

9 Which is the only European country to be doubly landlocked (that is, not only is it landlocked, but it is also surrounded by landlocked countries)?

10 The Swabian Sea is another name for which lake at the northern foot of the Alps?

Answers:

1 Santiago de Compostela

2 Dnieper

3 Phlegraean islands

4 Iceland

5 Sea of Marmara

6 Gavdos

7 South Ossetia

8 Poland

9 Liechtenstein

10 Lake Constance