Ground Zero

Hello, and welcome to my quiz blog.

First off I’d like to thank my friend Kaushik, who partially inspired me to put this together. He runs a quiz blog of his own called Quizzical Expressions – the link is also there in the sidebar.

This quiz blog is meant for both experienced collegiate quizzers as well as people who have just finished school and are graduating into the big bad world of college quizzing. As a result, some questions will be easy, some will be tough; some will be well-known standard questions – and some will be new. Do tell me if you think the balance is shifting too much one way.

I intend to post an average of one question a day – which means I could post three questions and then not post for three days and so forth. As I’ll be leaving the country in a week’s time, and won’t be settled for about a month, I’m going to try and post five weeks’ worth of questions in the next few days.

Let me lay down the rules.

Rules and Requests

1. You can post answers using the comment feature. As a courtesy to other readers, please encode your answers using rot13. This means – go to www.rot13.com , type your answer in the space provided, press ‘Cypher’ and then copy-paste the resulting encrypted message into the comment section of my blog and post it. That way your guesses cannot be seen by other readers unless they decrypt it using the same process, and nobody’s fun is spoiled.

2. The answers will typically be posted after 4-7 days. I haven’t yet decided on a rhythm. After the answers are posted, you are invited to rate the questions. Each question will have a specific question number, so just give the question number and then a Quality Rating (QR) on the scale of 0-5, with 0 being a bad question and 5 being a good question. Remember, good and bad are not the same as easy and tough. A tough question can be bad if it is too obscure and of interest to no one. A tough question can also be good – I’ve been to plenty of quizzes where no one could answer a particular question, but once the quiz master laid out the answer, everyone applauded. Some answers are just beautiful. So keep that in mind while rating the questions. Every now and then I’ll announce what the top rated questions are : ).
I also would like you to rate the questions on their Toughness (TR), again on a scale of 0-5, with 0 being easy and 5 being tough. So your comment would look like this:

QNo. 0.0. QR 2.0 TR 4.2

3. Try to answer the questions without googling. However, there is no strict rule against it – and after all, I can’t stop you. But a common courtesy is that when you google part of answer, you acknowledge it while posting the answer. The community of web-quizzers respects honesty as much as knowledge.

4. Rule number four…. Well I actually can’t think of anything. I’ll let you know if that changes. On to the questions!

Set Zero

Treasure Hunt

Where would you find these words:

0.1.
When Ivo goes back with the ___, the ___;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud,
The great crowd will feel proud,
Seeing Barlow and Bates with the ___, the ___;
And the rest coming home with the ___.


Had to remove a word to keep it from being obvious. All the blanks are the same word.

0.2.
To the dead of the Indian armies who fell honoured in France and Flanders. Mesopotamia and Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far-east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are recorded and who fell in India or the north-west frontier and during the Third Afgan War.

0.3.
When you go home tell them of us and say for your tomorrow we gave our today.

Identify and Connect:

0.4.






0.5



Random

0.6
The odds were:

The Hero: 16/1
The Hero’s male friend: 6/1
The hero’s female friend: 10/1
The hated teacher: 7/1
The beloved headmaster: 1/5
The ex-girlfriend: 11/2
The hated schoolmate: 22/1

Odds for what?

0.7
How is Aorangi Park, which lies in the grounds of the All England Club, better known?



0.8
This animal is called a sable/marten in English. However, let its name in the local language be X. Due to its abundance near a river, the river got the same name X, and then the river gave it to a town near the river, and the town/river gave it to a wood pulp mill nearby, and the mill company grew.... into what?



0.9
“These are exalted Gharaniq whose intercession is to be desired" - translation from Arabic. The verses comprising this sentence are said to have been added to the 53rd sura of the Qur'an entitled Surat-annajm, The Star (53:19ff) in order to acknowledge the validity of the goddesses al-Lat and al-'Uzza and Manat. Tradition goes on to say that the verses were later withdrawn and denounced. What phrase was coined to describe these words?

0.10
These paintings were done in ink on rice paper. The artist, is however, more famous for something else. Who is the artist?







Question Zero

0.0 Why is my blog address basethirteen ?