2015 WQC

On Saturday, I travelled with around 100 other UK quizzers to the National Brewery Centre at Burton upon Trent to take part in the 2015 staging of the World Quizzing Championship. I took part in 2014 (and gave a write-up of the day and my performance HERE) and came 893rd with 64 points, which I was reasonably pleased with then for a first attempt. However, this year, I wanted to do much better and set my target at the start of 2015 as top 500 in the world.

The individual WQC paper was very difficult, particularly the first half of Entertainment, History, Lifestyle, and Sciences. Only the first two of those are reasonable subjects for me at the best of times, I'm average on lifestyle-type stuff (brands, fashion, tourism, etc.) and weak at science. The Entertainment round in particular was one I found brutal, and only scored 9/30 - I managed to score three more than that in the round on my debut last year. I was somewhat surprised to get 15/30 on History, which I wouldn't have expected going into the quiz.

In the second half, I got 16 on Culture (my highest score of the day), 14 on World (usually my best subject), 9 on Media, and a dreadful 5 on Sport. Having said that, sport has always been a weak area for me and - with a lack of interest in most sports - I can't see that changing much in the future. I would at least like to be competitive in it, which I reckon I could maybe achieve, but I'll never be a great sports quizzer because I lack the background and natural interest in it to achieve the sort of 18 and 19 scores that many were getting. And my knowledge of stamp-collecting and tennis player superstitions is even more minimal...

Overall, however, I finished 466th (I'm assuming all the results have been uploaded by now and we're just awaiting the country, genre, and age group winners (of which I'm hoping to be the highest-ranked under-20 in the world but we'll see) and I'm pleased with that, having thought about it. It was a very tough quiz in which even good quizzers were on some occasions thirty or so points down on last year, so I'm chuffed to have improved a fair amount. Next year I'll go for top 150 and try to strengthen the weaker areas that continue to drag me down in a lot of areas of quiz - sport, classical music, nature and science are the three main ones.

Three mistakes I shouldn't have made: putting Fokine instead of Petipa for ballet choreographer; putting Selena instead of Thalia for queen of Latin pop music; putting Bartholdi instead of Eiffel for French architect and engineer.

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

My 2015 quizzing resolutions

This'll be the first year for which I set formal - or formal in the sense that I'm getting them down on here to look back on - quizzing resolutions for myself. They won't all be measurable in a mathematical sense, as a couple of them are simply ambitions of a more general nature, but I'd still like to achieve everything here, and will do my best to do so.

1 Should we be successful in getting on the show, reach at least the quarter-finals of University Challenge with Liverpool. This is the main one - I'm really proud to have got into the team as it is, to be honest, so to win a match or two would be fantastic. It'll be tough, especially considering the strength of much of the opposition, but might as well go for it. Oh, and that's if we get on...

2 Finish in the top 500 at this year's WQC. I finished 893rd at my first ever WQC in June, which I was pleased with at the time, but I calculated that another twenty points or so this year should see me in and around the top 500, which I'd be relatively pleased with for an improvement for this year.

3 Break the 70 mark at at least one GP this year. At the British Open at the start of December, I got 58.4, which is my highest GP score yet, so I reckon by the end of 2015 I will have come a fair bit closer to reaching the 70 mark.

4 Get at least one full house in the Lancaster City Quiz League (got 7/8 a few weeks ago and should have got 8/8 but blurted the wrong answer out instead of giving it a bit of thought). Those questions that night fell really well for me and I doubt I'll get a kinder set of questions anytime soon, but might as well go for getting at least one full house.

5 Attend my first ever BQC in September and my first ever EQC in November. Never attended either of these events before (obviously!) so just going to give them a go and see how I fare in terms of the style of question and a range in difficulty levels. I may come up with more specific targets closer to the time.

6 Maintain this blog and write stuff on it more regularly. Uni has seen my posting frequency decrease a great deal, so I'll try to write a lot more this year (and post a lot more questions).

7 Adopt a better approach to weaknesses. In other words, actually address them - stuff like sport, classical music, and nature - rather than simply ignoring them. Perhaps I'll find them more interesting if I dedicate more time to reading about them as well.

8 Achieve at least one top-30 genre finish at a GP this year. Fairly simple, and measurable. Just a single top-30 finish in any genre at any GP will do me in this instance.

Why quizzing?

I often wonder how and why I got into quizzing; it certainly seems to predominantly be a pastime for the middle-aged - going by attendances at pub quizzes and quiz leagues up and down the country, anyway. I don't particularly mind that - I enjoy the competition, the learning, the fact-hoarding, the reading, the travelling. It all adds up to something that never seems to get old for me - well, it hasn't yet, and I'm one of those people who tends to go through obsessive phases of things, in that I'll watch a certain TV show and read as much about it as I can, or a particular film series, or a book, or something else. Anyway, here's how it all started, for anyone who's interested...

Around a year or two ago, I was watching TV one day, bored, when I stumbled across a new quiz show - The Chase. New to me, anyway, though I think it must have been in its second or third, perhaps fourth, series. It was different to anything I'd watched in terms of quiz TV - fast-paced, exciting, loads of questions, but the thing that interested me most was the chaser in the chair. I was mesmerised by their question-answering prowess, reeling out answer after answer in the final chase. I wondered who these people were. How do they become so knowledgeable, I thought to myself? Truth be told, I didn't know, but I sure was going to find out. And from there it started and spiralled...

I've always had a fairly decent general knowledge for my age, I think - I remember having a pack of world capitals snap cards when I was younger, and I'd always had encyclopaedias and an interest in reading from a young age, but The Chase had awoken a desire to learn far more than I'd ever done before. I started reading about the chasers themselves, saw that one of them was described as a Grand Master, and decided to look it up. It was from there that I found the Quizzing UK website, and thus the Grand Prix circuit that I've recently started playing on. I'd never known that something like that existed, and the names that I saw read like a who's who of quizzing - Kevin Ashman, Pat Gibson, Anne Hegerty, Mark Labbett, among others. 

That's when I decided to improve - there wasn't much of a pattern to it, as I recall. Generally I read a lot online, answered questions, picked up as many facts as I could, and tried to cement the chestnuts. It was then that I discovered just how much there is to learn, and just how good the top players are. The standards at the top really are incredible. Fast forward a year or so, and I was in need of more. That was when, as a random search, I googled "Lancaster quiz league", not expecting to find anything. I was surprised. I discovered the Lancaster City Quiz League in November 2013, read the questions, looked at the teams and the stats and had a desire to join. I only plucked up the courage to join in January, when I sent off an email to the league's secretary, who put me straight into The Pub's (yes, that is the very original name of the pub) team. I played a few matches and found I really enjoyed the competition - light-hearted socially, but fierce once the questions were being asked. Had I not sent that email, this blog would probably never have been started, and I probably would have confined quizzing to the back of my mind like everything else.

From there, I started attending the Quizzing GPs, and taking part in more quiz events. On Saturday, I'll be attending the Stockport Grand Prix, my third Quizzing UK event so far, a culmination of all the knowledge I've accumulated so far. As quizzers know, there's always more to learn...

2014 World Quizzing Championships - review

I travelled up to Edinburgh on Saturday to take part in the leg of the World Quizzing Championships there, and I really enjoyed it. The main individual quiz, set over eight categories for the World Championships - those categories being Culture, Entertainment, Media, Sport, Lifestyle, History, Science and World - provided a big variety in the questions of both difficulty and style, and I thought they were really well-written and enjoyable, even if I didn't know many of the answers. Well done to the organisers as it must be an extremely arduous process to have to write questions that will be accessible enough to the whole world, but also check them again and again for errors and then translate them into many different languages.

As anyone who has been reading this blog so far will know, I've only recently started taking part in competitive quizzing, so I wasn't expecting a particularly high score, but just wanted to see how I would do against what turned out to be some very tough questions. Not that that was a surprise to me. I was expecting difficult questions, just as those in the Stafford GP I played in were, and most of them were certainly testing. As it turned out, I got 64/210, which - while it was never going to trouble people further up the leaderboard - I was reasonably happy with for a first attempt. Going by the results so far, I've come 921st, which is probably about where I was expecting to come on my first go, if I'm being honest.

Of the eight categories, my joint-highest score came in Entertainment and World, with 12 in both of those. Lowest was 3 in Sport & Games, which I found extremely difficult and filled with the sort of obscure questions that I simply wouldn't have known and references in them I'd never come across anyway. Sport was also my lowest by some margin at Stafford, so there's a definite pattern emerging there that it's my weakest area. And I'll admit that apart from football, tennis, darts, and snooker, and many probably wouldn't even class the latter two as sports, my knowledge of sport is virtually nonexistent, so any gaps will be badly exposed when it comes to the sorts of questions you get in these papers that rely on in-depth knowledge and wider reading. Fanny Blankers-Koen, for example, appears to be well-known, but when I saw her name given as the answer, it didn't ring any bells whatsoever.

I'm not gonna moan about not attaining a higher score or finish, as I'd have been lying if I said I was expecting come in the top 250 or so at this point. Still, these aren't supposed to be easy quizzes, and I think they'd lose much of their appeal if they were, so I'll keep working on areas where I'm weakest, and hopefully this time next year I'll have improved by a fair distance.