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

The last fortnight in my quiz world...

I haven't been updating this blog as much recently - I was previously posting an update every two or three days, but those have since dried up to around once a week in frequency, thanks to a combination of things. Ironically, I've been working harder on my quizzing, as well as having a lot to do at uni in terms of reading and writing essays.

However, apart from that, I've been pretty lucky in quiz endeavours in the last fortnight or so.

Firstly, I was on the winning team at a university pub quiz not long ago - £100 jackpot, though the presence of six of us meant that I only actually came away with £15 or so. Still, not a bad night's work.

I also played for the Rainhill Victoria team in the Merseyside Quiz League Challenge Cup competition. Mark Kerr, one of the team's players, sent out a message on Facebook to anyone who fancied playing for the night as they had a couple of regular players missing. I volunteered, travelled to Southport, and played in the match against Zetland, which we luckily won 47-38. I got eight points, which I was reasonably pleased with for a debut. They've asked me to play in the remaining Challenge Cup fixtures, which I'm happy to do, so I'll be playing in another match a week tomorrow. I'd like to improve my score, as I think nerves played a part in the first match as well, particularly until I settled in and started to get a few right answers.

On Saturday, I travelled to Rainhill - ironically the venue for next week's match - to attend the Quiz in the North 2, a follow-up to the successful Quiz in the North held at Rochdale in August. It was a great day of quizzing, and I'm looking forward to more of these events if they're held. On a personal note, I achieved probably my best result yet in a competitive written quiz - 92/170, which placed me 27th out of the 42 competitors. Not bad, I don't think. There were a few silly errors but not half as many as there normally are from me.

The European Quizzing Championships took place this weekend in Bucharest, Romania. Olav Bjortomt is the new individual champion, with Kevin Ashman and Finland's Tero Kalliolevo finishing in second and third respectively. Well done to those three. Pity I couldn't attend, as I'd have loved to, but I'm determined to be there next year, where the venue will be Rotterdam. Sounds like a great event, and all the feedback I've read from those who attended seems to be overwhelmingly positive.

Anyway, apologies for those - if there are any of you - who've been checking the blog regularly only to find no new updates or questions. I'll try to update it more, and I'll write a quiz to be posted after this.

Geography-biased questions

A host of questions centred around my favourite quizzing area:

1 The Milad Tower offers panoramic views of which large Asian capital?

2 What is the largest island of Fiji, and the site of the nation's capital, Suva?

3 A lake shared by Argentina and Chile is named on the Chilean side by one of the founders of the country. How do the Chileans know this lake that the Argentinians know as Lake Buenos Aires?

4 How many members are there in the Commonwealth of Independent States, an organisation whose members are typically ex-Soviet countries? 

5 Which US city's Beale Street is an iconic thoroughfare in the history of blues music?

6 Which US river flooded in early 1937, with damage stretching from Pennsylvania to Illinois? The river is widest just west of Louisville.

7 The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and utilisation of what?

8 What is the nearest US city to the Falls of the Ohio National Wildlife Conservation Area?
9 What is the county town of Shropshire?
10 Galle is a major city situated on the south-western tip of which island?
11 A lusophone is someone who speaks which language?
12 Taur Matan Ruak is the president of which republic?
13 The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connects Brooklyn with which other New York City borough?
14 What is the capital - and largest city - of Tajikistan?
15 The OPCW is the Organisation for the Prohibition of what?
16 Who was the first woman to sit as an MP in the House of Commons?
17 Among the world's least-developed countries, which landlocked African republic was formerly known as Nyasaland?
18 The flag of which German state is a bicolour of white over green?
19 Which Italian company is the second-largest utility company in Europe?
20 The Abraj Al Bait is the tallest clock tower, and one of the tallest structures, in the world. In which city of major religious importance can it be seen?




Answers:
1 Tehran
2 Viti Levu
3 General Carrera Lake
4 Nine
5 Memphis
6 Ohio River
7 Wetlands
8 Louisville
9 Shrewsbury
10 Sri Lanka
11 Portuguese
12 East Timor
13 Staten Island
14 Dushanbe
15 Chemical weapons
16 Nancy Astor
17 Malawi
18 Saxony
19 Enel
20 Mecca

QM Quiz #5

1 O Globo is a newspaper of which major city in the southern hemisphere?
2 Which decade saw the premiere of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, the abolition of slavery in France, and the death of George Washington, first president of the USA?

3 Pulse was a 1995 live double album by which English band?
4 What was the last Summer Olympics - year or city - at which golf featured?
5 Which Swede received the 1903 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "his electrolytic theory of dissociation"? An equation, an acid definition, a lunar crater, and a laboratory at Stockholm University are all named after him.
6 Which Hungarian-born American business magnate is known as "the man who broke the Bank of England" because of his short sale of $10bn worth of GBP, giving him a profit of $1bn during the 1992 Black Wednesday currency crisis?
7 Which American professional baseball team are based at Miller Park?
8 What is the capital of Lithuania?
9 Named after a Charles Dickens character, what is a gamp?
10 Also hosted by Paul Merton and Frank Skinner, who was the original presenter of the BBC TV series, Room 101?
11 Immortalised on canvas by Turner, which 98-gun ship was launched in 1798 and used at the Battle of Trafalgar?
12 What is the sum of the total angles in an octagon?
13 0121 is the STD calling code of which UK city?
14 What was the surname of the Dutch graphic artist who was known for his impossible constructions and explorations of infinity?
15 Taken from Act Three of Othello, what was Elgar's title for his set of five marches for symphony orchestra, the first of which was the basis for "Land of Hope and Glory"?

16 Which two letters distinguish between the name of one half of a successful US music duo, and the name of the bass guitarist for The Clash?
17 In which year did Steffi Graf win both the Wimbledon's singles and doubles title, completing the latter alongside Gabriela Sabatini?
18 Her symbol being the vulture, who was the principal goddess of Egyptian mythology?
19 In the UK, what is the minimum legal age for purchasing a pet?
20 Who founded the weekly journal, Harijan, in February 1933?

Answers:
1 Rio de Janeiro
2 1790s
3 Pink Floyd
4 1904 (St. Louis)
5 Svante Arrhenius
6 George Soros
7 Milwaukee Brewers

8 Vilnius
9 Umbrella
10 Nick Hancock
11 HMS Temeraire (1798)
12 1080º
13 Birmingham
14 Escher
15 Pomp and Circumstance
16 'on'
17 1988
18 Mut
19 12
20 Mahatma Gandhi

World Cup quiz

Today marks the beginning of the centrepiece of world football. Of course, if you don't like football, it's the beginning of a month of hell, most likely, but I don't understand why anyone wouldn't enjoy the World Cup. Every nation's fans believing that this year just may be theirs. Passion, glory, flair all on show, coupled with renewed hopes that England may go on a decent run for once - OK, I'm well into the realms of the unrealistic now... Here are twenty-five questions I've written on the World Cup (1930-present):

1 Prior to the 1966 World Cup, the Jules Rimet trophy was stolen from Westminster Central Hall. Following ransom demands and police pursuits, what was the name of the black-and-white collie dog that found it at the bottom of a garden hedge while walking with its owner?

2 Contested by the finalists of the 1928 Summer Olympics football tournament, Uruguay and Argentina, what was the final score in the inaugural 1930 FIFA World Cup final?

3 An already-qualified nation chose to withdraw from the 1950 FIFA World Cup following FIFA's requirement that all players wear shoes during matches – the players from this country were accustomed to playing barefoot at the time. Which country?

4 During the final of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, French midfielder Zinedine Zidane became the fourth player to be sent off during a World Cup final when he headbutted which Italian defender's chest, supposedly after derogatory comments from the defender about Zidane's mother?

5 Considered one of the greatest Italian players ever, which centre-forward led his nation to two World Cup victories – in 1934 and 1938 – and has a long-standing legacy in the form of a major Italian football stadium being named after him. Which player?

6 Which Pole finished as top scorer at the 1974 FIFA World Cup, with seven goals?

7 Former Paraguayan centre-back Carlos Gamarra holds what notorious distinction in World Cup history?

8 Who will be England's representative referee at this year's World Cup?

9 Which country scored the first goal in World Cup history, doing so on July 13, 1930?

10 At the 1990 FIFA World Cup, England were placed in a group alongside the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, and which African country, who finished bottom of the group with just two points?

11 Doing so in 1990, which African nation was the first to reach a World Cup quarter-final?

12 A certain amount of controversy was caused prior to the 1978 World Cup final when which country accused the Argentinians they were facing of using stalling tactics to delay the match?

13 The Mexican goalkeeper Antonio Carbajal and which German international are the only two players to have appeared at five different World Cup tournaments?

14 An average of 2.52 per match, how many goals were scored – to the nearest ten – at the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea?

15 What was peculiar about the 1958 World Cup quarter-finals?

16 Defeating Uruguay in the third-place play-off in 1954, which side won the 100th match in World Cup history?

17 In the 1938 World Cup, which nation fielded both the oldest and the youngest player of the entire tournament?

18 Amid controversy, in which European city was Qatar chosen to host the 2022 World Cup?

19 Who was voted “best goalkeeper” at the 2006 FIFA World Cup?

20 Jan Olsson was the defender that Johan Cruyff famously bamboozled with his namesake “Cruyff turn” at the 1974 FIFA World Cup. Which country was he playing for?

21 How old was Cameroon's Roger Milla when he became the oldest player to play and score at a World Cup, doing so at the United States staging of the event in 1994?

22 To within five, how many hat-tricks have been scored in World Cup history?

23 Which Argentine-Spanish footballer is regarded as the greatest player never to have played at a World Cup finals event?

24 Portugal's Eusebio was the top scorer at England's 1966 World Cup. How many goals did he score?

25 How many different nations have competed at World Cup finals tournaments so far (not including the upcoming 2014 staging)?

Answers:

1 Pickles

2 4-2 (to Uruguay)

3 India

4 Marco Materazzi

5 Giuseppe Meazza

6 Grzegorz Lato

7 Fastest own goal

8 Howard Webb

9 France

10 Egypt

11 Cameroon

12 Netherlands

13 Lothar Matthäus

14 161

15 None of the losing teams scored

16 Austria

17 Netherlands
18 Zürich

19 Iker Casillas

20 Sweden

21 42 

22 48 (43-53)

23 Alfredo Di Stefano

24 9 

25 76 

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.