Set Two

Hello, and welcome to XQZ. If you're new to this blog, please see the first posting Ground Zero in order to learn the basic rules of this quiz blog. Remember to use rot13.

The answers to Set Zero will be up tomorrow (Friday). I'm leaving the country on Saturday morning, and will try to post Set Three (and the answers to Set One) from my sister's place in the UK. After that I'm afraid there will be a hiatus until I make my new home away from home a bit homely. But it might be shorter than I expect, so keep watching this space!

To the Questions!

Set Two

Picture, picture, in the blog.....

2.1
He was rejected twice by the Academy of Arts in Vienna (1907–1908) for "lack of talent"—which he resented deeply—he did not try to find a different job or learn a profession. He was told he should become an architect, since he had some flair for painting buildings. He worked as a struggling painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists (there is evidence he produced over 2000 paintings and drawings before World War I). Here are two of his paintings. Who was he?




2.2
The picture shows the ground on which a certain sport or game is played. Which game/sport? (Credit for this question goes to Aditya Kumar)



2.3
With which pseudoscience (which is also a protoscience) is this diagram associated?



2.4
What is shown here?



2.5
A standard lateral thinking question is: Consider nine dots laid out in a square grid. Without taking your pen off the paper, draw four straight lines such that each dot lies on at least one line. Management consultants used this problem to illustrate to companies that some problems required innovative thinking and the recognition of unconscious assumptions. The solution to the problem is shown below. What now common English phrase was coined by the consultants to describe the solution and this way of thinking?



Random

2.6
The National Geographic is renowned for its attention to detail and the veracity of its maps and articles. However in its May 1977 issue, which featured the Celtic world and its history, one of the maps was inaccurate on one small count. None of the readers complained though. Why?
(Once again, credit to Hrishikesh Varma)

2.7
Which venture in 1896 was financed by the sale of souvenir stamps and medals and the donation of money by a wealthy businessman called Georgios Averoff?
(And again, thank you Mr. Varma)

2.8
It costs only $28, and was created for the first time some time in the late 1960s by sculptor Ram Chandra and Dr Pramod Karan Sethi. There are at least 72,000 users in India alone, and it is also popular in war torn countries like Afghanistan, Rwanda and Cambodia. What is it?

2.9
In terms of Longitude, to which states do the Easternmost and Westernmost points of the United State of America belong?

2.10
During the opening of the Philadelphia concert in this year's Live 8 concert, Will Smith led the combined audiences of London, Philadelphia, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Barrie in a synchronised finger click at a rate of one click every three seconds. What did it represent?

Salut!

Set One

Hello, and welcome to XQZ. If you're new to this blog, please see the first posting Ground Zero in order to learn the basic rules of this quiz blog. Remember to use rot13.

The solutions for set Zero haven't been posted yet (they'll be posted after 4 - 7 days), so feel free to send in your answers.

One extra point - while rating the questions you are free to suggest ways of improving them so that they are more interesting.

On to the questions:

Set One

Dire Straights

1.1
Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book were official USAF investigations of what unnatural phenomenon?

1.2
BASE jumping is the sport of using a parachute to jump from fixed objects. "BASE" is an acronym that stands for the four categories of objects from which one can jump. What are the four categories?

1.3
The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue. What is Mao Tse-Tung describing?

Fill in the blanks

1.4
Fill the blanks (Use phrase): It was first used by the London Times on 28 December, 1937 of that year, "Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new _______ __ ____ ___________?"

1.5
Fill in the blanks. All the blanks are the same and consist of a phrase of two words:
There's a big holler tree down the road here from me
where you lay down a doller er two.
When you come round the bend and when you come back again
There's a jug full of good old __________.
Oh they call it that old ____________ and them that refuse it are few.
I'll shut up my mug if you fill up my jug with some good old _____________.
(Seen this at a couple of quizzes)

1.6
Complete (Olympics) - Otis Davis, Carl Kaufmann, Malcolm Spence, ________.
(Credit for this question goes to Hrishikesh Varma)

1.7
Fill up the blank with a sentence and tell me who spoke these lines:
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. __________________________ ; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
(Once again by Hrishikesh Varma)

Picture that

1.8
Whose coat of arms was this:




1.9
What is going on here?




1.10
The women in this picture are about to start on an expedition to climb Mount Everest. This climb was on the 20th anniversary of another famous climb made in 1984. Who made the climb in 1984?



Salut!

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 ?