InBloom 2015 GenQuizChrist UniversityAbhishek Upadhya7th Feb

Finals

Infinite Pounce - Clockwise

• +10 for correct answer ( on Direct and Pass). No Negatives.

• Infinite Bounce – If you answer a question, the next direct goes to the team sitting next to you.

• If no one answers, the next question goes to the next team.

• 15 questions.

• Pounce – Gives you a chance to score off an *easy* question, even if it is not your direct.

• Register your pounce during the pounce interval before the question is made open to all. You get +10/-5.

• Show the complete answer in writing. Wrong/No answer gives you negatives.

1.

• This is a woodcut image from a 19th century Japanese book of short stories titled “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan”. This shows a man working in a Japanese Bakery that makes senbei – “rice crackers”. Much before these were seen in USA.

• This research by Yasuko Nakamachi leads to a Japanese attribution to what is commonly known to be a different cuisine’s Dinner complement. What?

Answers Follow

1.

• This is the theory that Chinese “Fortune Cookies” that are given out after the meal, is actually a Japanese practice.

2.

• According to the creator Monica Helms, this is the description behind this flag

• "The light blue is the traditional color for baby boys, pink is for girls. White is in between. The pattern is such that no matter which way you fly it, it will always be correct. This symbolizes us trying to find correctness in our own lives”.

• If we’re more aware of a different flag for a large group, what is this flag for?

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2.

• Transgender Pride.

• Rainbow Pride is for the large cause of LGBT. Many flags exist for solely

Transgender individuals to express themselves.

3.

• The first colour represents the state in which it is today.

• The next two hint at upcoming stages of vegetation followed by full-scale terraforming.

• In Stranger in a Strange Land, this passage describes the same entity

• “Harshaw drew a rectangle, sketched a circle with an arrow leading out from it to the upper right.”

• What is being described?

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3.

• The Martian Flag

• Blue represents complete terraforming, and Green represents Vegetation.

• In “Stranger in a Strange Land”, the symbol for Mars is used as the flag.

4.

• This bird species are known by a two-word common name, the first word being a visual attribute and the second being the family of songbirds they belong two.

• Name it.

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4.

• Zebra Finches

5.

• A common trope in Geometry is to construct figures using these constraints. This xkcd makes fun of it. Fill in the two blanks X and Y.

• A ruler/scale can also be used for the purpose as Y. So what’s the difference between the Ruler and Y?

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5.

• Compass and Straightedge

• A straightedge is a straight instrument used to assist making straight lines for geometric figures.

• A ruler is a straightedge with some scale on it so that it can act not only as a straightedge, but also as a device to measure distance.

6.

• In a letter to John Bernoulli in 1698, he mentioned that he prefers to use the dot symbol to indicate Multiplication.

• Who was this, and why did he prefer the dot to the conventional symbol X ?

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6.

• Gottfried Leibniz

• The Multiplication Cross symbol X is often confused for the letter x.

7.

• What hypothesis was tested by this paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Doctors and Statisticians from Munich, Germany? Data from previous years were used as control to determine base level.

• Considering nobody cared for event 7, Identify the two countries responsible for events 5 and 6?

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7.

• #SoccerKills

• “Viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of an acute cardiovascular event.”

• Match 5, Germany versus Argentina - Quarter Finals – 1-1 (Penalty shootout : 4-2)

• Match 6, Germany versus Italy – Semi Finals (0-2)

• Match 7, Germany versus Portugal (for third-place standing) (3-1)

8.

• In what is a classic case of twisted fate and Irony, when and how did the creator of the mentholated topical ointment Vicks Magic Croup Salve (Vicks VapoRub) : The Greensboro pharmacist Lunsford Richardson II – Die?

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8.

• In the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

9.

• Followup Question: Although the disease did not originate in Spain, Why was this Pandemic popular with the misnomer Spanish Flu?

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9.

• Not because it originated in Spain, but because Spain—which was a neutral country during World War I did not censor its press and was, therefore, the first nation to publically acknowledge the existence of an epidemic.

• Most epidemiologists track the origin of the disease to Haskell County, Kansas, where dozens of people on isolated farms across the county were diagnosed with a “severe type” of flu in February 1918 (viruses of the H1N1 family)

10.

• Connect this list of 12 companies with this man. If the other 11 companies don’t exist anymore, Which is the blanked company that does?

1. American Cotton Oil

2. American Sugar

3. American Tobacco

4. Chicago Gas

5. Distilling & Cattle Feeding

6. ___________

7. Laclede Gas

8. National Lead

9. North American

10. Tennessee Coal Iron and RR

11. U.S. Leather

12. United States Rubber

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10.

• Charles Henry Dow who started the Dow (Jones) Industrial Average Index with these 12 Industrial companies as its components

• The company that still exists from this 12 is General Electric.

11.

• For about two months in 1943, this disappeared from the shelves completely. In the midst of World War II, the government ordered a ban on it.

• The manufacturing of weaponry and other wartime necessities was deemed more important than the manufacturing of the machines that did this, and the conservation of materials—such as the thick wax paper used to wrap it—was integral. But the ban did not go over well with companies or with the general public, especially housewives who even wrote to the NY Times saying the extra work they’ve to do now every morning.

• “I should like to let you know how important this is to the morale and saneness of a household.My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast….”

• Eventually, the ban was lifted in two months by Claude Wickard, who headed the War Food Administration committee and was the Secretary of Agriculture.

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11.

• The Greatest Thing : Sliced Bread

• The expected savings from the ban was greatly exaggerated,

And a whole lot of inconvenience was caused.

12.

• In 1920, these were set up in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and X, the four places at which content was imported into the country. At that time, there was hardly any indigenous industry for this in India. A certificate granted by any of them was valid throughout British India.

• What much-in-the-news Organization?

• Which was the fourth location?

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12.

• Central “Board of Film Censors”

• Rangoon ( Since Burma was part of India then)

13.

• Id this legend

• Id his most famous creation referenced in this picture, and the TV show this image is taken from.

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13.

• Gary Gygax

• Co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons . The show is Futurama

14.

• In Pratchett’s Discword Series novel “The Truth”, the following advertisement appears. Put funda for the real-world reference.

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14.

• Gunilla Goodmountain is the owner of a Press.

• Goodmountain -> Gutenberg

15.

• The first panel of this comic is blanked. Which famous line from the 1990s is this cartoon mocking?

Answers Follow

15.

• On the Internet, Nobody knows you’re a dog.

Infinite Pounce – Aunty-Clockwise

• +10 for correct answer ( on Direct and Pass). No Negatives.

• Infinite Bounce – If you answer a question, the next direct goes to the team sitting next to you.

• If no one answers, the next question goes to the next team.

• 15 questions.

• Pounce – Gives you a chance to score off an *easy* question, even if it is not your direct.

• Register your pounce during the pounce interval before the question is made open to all. You get +10/-5.

• Show the complete answer in writing. Wrong/No answer gives you negatives.

1.

• In 1539, Albert V, Duke of Bavaria decreed that Beer shall be brewed only between the period of 29th September to 29th April, and a complete Summer Brewing ban was sought. The reason given was that the high levels of heat during the boiling led to many Brewery fires in Munich.

• Germans had been brewing beer for over 1000s of years till this decree.

• The predominant type of beer in Germany, since then, changed till about late 1800s.

• What was the change, and why did this happen?

Answers Follow

1.

• From Ale to Lager. Because, Bavarian Winters allowed Lagers to thrive.

• Ale yeasts produce the best beer flavor at an ambient temperature of 59 to 77°F (15 to 25°C). This allows brewers to make beer year-round in most climates and it explains why ales have been the standard brew almost everywhere throughout human history, before the invention of refrigeration in the late 19th century.

• Lager yeasts, on the other hand, produce the best beer flavor at a low ambient temperature of 41 to 50°F (5 to 10°C). Before refrigeration, lager yeasts, therefore, were unsuitable for beer-making in much of the earth's temperate zone for most of the year.

2.

• Considering that many Chinese people can’t understand the Latin alphabet, it makes sense that most of the popular URLs within China also have a number equivalent.Numbers are easily memorisable. With the complexity of Chinese homophones, it also gives the added advantage of choosing something close to your product or something that sounds like your brand.

• Eg. One video sharing site is called 6.cn because the word for “six” is a near-homophone for the word “to stream.” (Liù as opposed to Liú)

• The url 51job.com sounds like Wu/Wo[5] Yao/Yow[1] (I Want) job

• Which website does the url 1688.com lead to, and why so?

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2.

• Alibaba.com “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”

3.

• “After that point, we were totally confined. The military occupied the lobby and journalists were searched and stopped from working. I was on a balcony. The still photographs that a few of us took of the scene seemed unremarkable to me, only because I was so far away on that balcony.

• Authorities inside the hotel confiscated footage, but I packed my film into a box of tea and gave it to a French student who was heading back to Paris. She got it to Magnum. It was really common then to stow our films with passengers travelling back on planes, because it was quicker than air freighting and less admin. You'd often sit in airports looking for people who would take your film.”

• Story behind what?

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3.

• Stuart Franklin’s narration of how he shot, and transported the Tank Man photo he took of Tiananmen Square.

4.

• The Shin Yokohama Ramen Musem in Japan (not to be confused with the MomofukuAndo Instant Ramen Museum) – is dedicated to noodles - where the streetlights are shaped like Ramen bowls, and food can be purchased from various stalls inside.

• According to Professor George Solt, a historian at NYU who dissertation was on the Geopolitics of Ramen Noodles – why does the sun set every 15 minutes in the museum’s artificial sky?

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4.

• The regular sunset is a behavioural hack that is supposed to make you hungry.

5.

• In a rather tongue in cheek award, the Harvard Business School selected this as 2010’s best business model.

• Ever since they changed to their current business model, The typical payoff has risen to 100 times what they were making in 2005.

• On an average, employees of this “trade” earn about 17 times more than this country’s Per capita income. Over 2005 to 2012, in about 154 incidents, about $413 million was made.

• The actual running of the trade is quite sophisticated, with city financiers supplying the seed money for operations. Some organizations even have a chairman and a board of directors who keep minutes of their meetings.

• What is being talked about?

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5.

• Somali Piracy

6.

• In 1963, a television host/actor was flying back to New York with his wife. He was looking at notes for a new game show, and she asked if it was one of the knowledge-based games she liked.

• He: “Since ‘The $64,000 Question,’ the network won’t let you do those anymore.“They suspect you of giving them the answers.”

The rigging scandals of the 1950s had dampened the popularity of American quiz shows.

• What did she reply? [ “And the rest is history” moment]

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6.

• “Well, why don’t you give them the answers? And make people come up with the questions?”

• And that’s how Jeopardy was born.

7.

• We all know this famous sequence – what it is called, how is the next term generated etc.

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,…..

• Mathematicians treat the above sequence as a special case, and go on to define sequences such as

0,0,1,1,2,4,7,13,24,44…

What is this sequence/series called, a play on the original series, and to the method in which it is generated?

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7.

• The Fibonacci series is considered for adding up two previous terms.

• 0,0,1,1,2,4,7,13,24,44… is generated by adding up three previous terms, hence is known as the “Tribonacci” series.

• Higher order n-step Fibonacci sequences such as Tetranacci etc have also been studied.

8.

• Words like

Retail – Not wholesale

Detail – Finer aspects of the design/sculpture/architecture

Tailor – Well, Tailor.

have the common Old-French/Medieval Latin suffix “tail” in them.

What’s the very simple meaning of tail in this context?

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8.

• Tailler/taliare : meaning "to cut" / "to split”

• So if you’re honing up your pedantry skills, historically the tailor is the cutter, in the trade the 'tailor' is the man who sews or makes up what the 'cutter' has shaped.

9.

• Nothing spiritual about it, but Prime numbers such as 89, 449, 499, 4409, 4649, 4889 etc ( there are an infinite number of them) are known as Holey Primes.

• In other words, all other primes – eg. 29,41,73 etc are non-Holey primes.

• Why so – Put funda?

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9.

• Primes having only 0,4,6,8,9 as digits – These are the only digits with holes in them.

• 1,2,3,5,7 are open-form digits.

10.

• This 1960s Brit comedy film was about the concept of lifemanship, which went something like this. What was the Bollywood remake of this story?

“Well, gentlemen, lifemanship is the science of being one up on your opponents at all times. It is the art of making him feel that somewhere, somehow he has become less than you – less desirable, less worthy – less blessed.”

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10.

• Basu Chatterjee’s Chhoti Si Baat.

11.

• He received this email and went on to become their in-house Economist

• “I’m the president of a videogame company. We are running into a bunch of problems as we scale up our virtual economies, and as we link economies together. Would you be interested in consulting with us? Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments”

• Which company?

• And in a Pipedream-turned-to-reality situation, what’s his new role, albeit, a lot more challenging?

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11.

• Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new Finance Ministerused to Valve Software’s Economist-in-Residence.

12.

• What is common to the way the Moroccon Stew Dish Tajini, The Cypriot Dish Tavasare named. Non-exhaustive list, there are some Indian examples as well.

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12.

• They’re named after the Pots in which they’re made.

• “Tandoori Roti, GuLiappam” etc being some Indian examples

13.

• This English word that means “something in its purest and concentrated form” etymologically comes from being the fifth and highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy(after wind,water,fire,earth).

• So, if you know your French numbers and or what five kids born at a time are called – you should be able to work out this word.

• Alternatively, students preparing for GRE/GMAT probably have mugged this up already in their wordlists.

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13.

• Quintessence - from Middle French quinte essence, from Medieval Latin quintaessentia, literally, fifth essence

14.

• This is Karl Briullov’s famous early 19th century painting “The Last day of ______”. FITB

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14.

• The Last day of Pompeii

15.

• The TIME magazine made a clever quip about his name, and his artistic style, since he flung and dripped paint all around, and made it sound like the fearsome title given by journalists to one yet-unidentified man from the late 19th century.

• Who is the artist, and what’s the three-word title?

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15.

• Jackson Pollock.

• Jack the Dripper (from Jack the Ripper)

Fin.

Thank you