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.
Showing posts with label championships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label championships. Show all posts
Upcoming quiz miscellany
Not posted that much recently - too much legal reading. :( Still, I've started a spreadsheet database of questions, which I add to when I find something sufficiently interesting / likely to come up (or so I think) in a future quiz.
I found out the other day that the UoL University Challenge trials take place on 17th and 18th November - obviously, I'll be there. All it mentions is "a booklet of sample questions" - hmm, would be a bit embarrassing if I failed to do well after all this blog hoo-ha... all these written questions... all these quizzes attended.
I'm going to extend the deadline for the second 100Quiz until the end of the month. Not got a chance to sort it all out yet but I will do. So, anyone who hasn't had a chance to enter yet, you've still got time to do so if you wish.
Attending the second Quiz in the North on Saturday at Rainhill, which I'm looking forward to. I thought the first one was great, and I'm sure this will be as good. Also one of the few quizzes that's handy for where I am in Liverpool now. Also been asked to play in some MQL cup matches that are coming up, which I hope to do well in (mainly because I don't want to let people who've given me a chance down).
Needless to say, I'm not attending the European Quizzing Championships. Just not feasible at the moment with university, but I plan to attend in the future - hopefully when I have a better chance of doing reasonably well). However, good luck to all those taking part.
Having been back in Lancaster for the weekend (and Monday), I'm playing for The Pub in the LCQL tomorrow night versus Gregson A. Would be nice to get a win, but always a tricky fixture.
Questions
1 In which city was US president William McKinley shot and fatally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901?
2 Who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for "his outstanding, pioneer contribution to modern-day poetry"?
3 Lake Arenal, built artificially in 1979 to provide electricity to the country, is the largest lake in which Central American nation?
4 The term "ostrich guitar" was coined by which major rock music figure, who died in 2013?
5 Aurelia Cotta was the mother of which famous historical figure?
6 Boy, released in 1980, was which band's debut album?
7 What was the last pitched battle to be fought between English and Scottish armies?
8 The actresses Cloris Leachman and Maxine Cooper both made their film debuts in which 1955 Robert Aldrich film noir?
9 Who wrote the novel, The Buddha of Suburbia?
10 Which country will host the 2019 Pan American Games?
Answers:
1 Buffalo
2 TS Eliot
3 Costa Rica
4 Lou Reed
5 Julius Caesar
6 U2
7 Battle of Pinkie Cleugh
8 Kiss Me Deadly
9 Hanif Kureishi
10 Peru
I found out the other day that the UoL University Challenge trials take place on 17th and 18th November - obviously, I'll be there. All it mentions is "a booklet of sample questions" - hmm, would be a bit embarrassing if I failed to do well after all this blog hoo-ha... all these written questions... all these quizzes attended.
I'm going to extend the deadline for the second 100Quiz until the end of the month. Not got a chance to sort it all out yet but I will do. So, anyone who hasn't had a chance to enter yet, you've still got time to do so if you wish.
Attending the second Quiz in the North on Saturday at Rainhill, which I'm looking forward to. I thought the first one was great, and I'm sure this will be as good. Also one of the few quizzes that's handy for where I am in Liverpool now. Also been asked to play in some MQL cup matches that are coming up, which I hope to do well in (mainly because I don't want to let people who've given me a chance down).
Needless to say, I'm not attending the European Quizzing Championships. Just not feasible at the moment with university, but I plan to attend in the future - hopefully when I have a better chance of doing reasonably well). However, good luck to all those taking part.
Having been back in Lancaster for the weekend (and Monday), I'm playing for The Pub in the LCQL tomorrow night versus Gregson A. Would be nice to get a win, but always a tricky fixture.
Questions
1 In which city was US president William McKinley shot and fatally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901?
2 Who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for "his outstanding, pioneer contribution to modern-day poetry"?
3 Lake Arenal, built artificially in 1979 to provide electricity to the country, is the largest lake in which Central American nation?
4 The term "ostrich guitar" was coined by which major rock music figure, who died in 2013?
5 Aurelia Cotta was the mother of which famous historical figure?
6 Boy, released in 1980, was which band's debut album?
7 What was the last pitched battle to be fought between English and Scottish armies?
8 The actresses Cloris Leachman and Maxine Cooper both made their film debuts in which 1955 Robert Aldrich film noir?
9 Who wrote the novel, The Buddha of Suburbia?
10 Which country will host the 2019 Pan American Games?
Answers:
1 Buffalo
2 TS Eliot
3 Costa Rica
4 Lou Reed
5 Julius Caesar
6 U2
7 Battle of Pinkie Cleugh
8 Kiss Me Deadly
9 Hanif Kureishi
10 Peru
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.
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.
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.
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