An inter college biztech quiz conducted as a part of Avensis 2020. The winning team had a score of 180.

2. Rules
• 24 Questions
• Direct/Pass: +20/0
• Pounce: +20/-20
• QM is the Supreme Leader

3. X is a mid-size/large family car built in Derbyshire, United
Kingdom by the Japanese automaker Toyota. It was the
direct successor to the European Carina E and was available
as a four-door saloon, five-door liftback and estate.
The word X is derived from the French verb ‘advancer’,
meaning ‘to advance’ and is indicative of the step forward
that the model represented over its predecessor – the Carina
E – when it arrived in 1997.
The X was discontinued across Europe in late 2018 and was
replaced by the slightly larger XV70 Camry.
1

5. Avensis

6. X was founded in early 2007 by James Park and Eric
Friedman, who decided to build hardware after
being inspired by the Nintendo Wii. According to Park “we
didn’t know anything about hardware at the time… in
hindsight it was probably something completely dumb for us
to do.”
With their idea, they initially raised $400,000 but soon
realised that that wasn't enough, so they did the rounds of
potential investors with a circuit board stuck inside a glued
together DIY balsa wood case. Id X
2

8. Fitbit

9. Nike wanted to name their first shoe designs “Aztec,” but
they didn’t as Adidas already had a line named “Azteca Gold”
and threatened to sue. Nike then decided to name their
shoes X, after the Tlaxcalan general Hernando X, who
defeated the Aztecs in 1525 CE. This is how the conversation
between Bill Bowerman and Phill Knight, the co-founders of
Nike, went: “Who was that guy who kicked the (cr*p) out of
the Aztecs?” Bowerman asked Knight. “X,” he responded.
“Okay,” Bowerman said, “let’s call it the ‘X.’ ”
X became a key to the success of Nike when it was released
during the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Id X
3

11. Cortez

12. The programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and
Bob Whitehead worked at Atari and were the brain behind a
lot of video games. Demanding to be treated how musicians
are treated by record labels, the four programmers went to
meet the CEO of Atari, Ray Kassar, in May 1979. They wanted
royalties and their names to be put the boxes.
Unhappy with the idea, the CEO called them “towel
designers” and claimed that “anybody can do a cartridge.”
Crane, Miller, and Whitehead left their jobs to start “X”, a
company that promoted the names of the creators of the
games along with the games themselves which helped them
save from a metaphorical pitfall.
Id X
4

14. Activision

15. The "IT" vehicle in the video on next slide, was based on the
pre-release hype surrounding X, which prior to its public
reveal was known only by the code-name "It" and was the
subject of much speculation. No one knew how the product
would exactly look like but there was a lot of buzz regarding
it, since the news that the inventor of the 4x4 wheelchair was
making it leaked in the news. John Doerr went on
to speculate that it would be more important than the
Internet.
Id X
5

18. Segway

19. Drinking the X is a term used in business that means any
situation where managers demand employees hold an
unquestioning belief in their corporate strategy. The phrase
originates from the 1978 Johnstone massacre, where cult
leader Jim Jones called for mass suicide by drinking cyanide
laced drinks. Although witnesses who saw 900 people die
say that the drink mixed with poison was not of X but that of
a rival brand, but the event lead to phrase drinking the X,
causing a lot of negative publicity for X.
Id X and its rival brand, which was actually consumed.
6

21. Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid

22. The X defence is a defensive business strategy used to
stave off a hostile takeover, in which a company that is
threatened with a hostile takeover "turns the tables" by
attempting to acquire its would-be buyer. The name is
inspired from a popular game of the same name.
7

24. Pacman

25. X is a blended scotch and is "100% whiskey made for
mixing". The term X harks back to whisky making heritage.
It's a reference to a condition that maltmen sometimes
picked up while working long shifts, turning the barley by
hand. It had a tendency to cause their arm to hang down a
bit like a ______ , so they nicknamed it X. X is made from
three Speyside distilleries, which explains the three _________
on the bottle’s shoulder.
Id X
8

27. Monkey Shoulder

28. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, many professional sporting
organizations and regulatory bodies expressed concern about
the prevalence of cigarette advertising in Formula 1 racing. Until
that point, virtually all of the world’s top drivers raced in cars
emblazoned with cigarette brand logos, but the sudden ban on
cigarette company sponsorship in Europe precipitated an
exodus of cigarette brands leaving the sport.
To circumvent this inconvenient restriction, the marketing team
at X, which was a major sponsor of Ferrari came up with a
dastardly ingenious idea; they would use subliminal visual
messaging to convey the brand without using the typographical
logo of the company itself.
Which brand and how did they accomplish to promote
themselves?
9

30. Marlboro accomplished this by using a barcode-style
design that, at the high speeds at which F1 cars travel
around the track, was almost as recognizable as the logo
itself.

31. X is a dating app start-up incorporated in September by
Barghavi Govindrajan and geneticist George Church. The
app aims to match its users based on DNA and Church
argues this could solve parents passing on inherited
diseases. The news of this app created massive outrage
online as people claim that its unethical and promotes
eugenics. X’s name is a portmanteau of Digital and the
internet slang of purpose it aims to serve.
Id X whose motto is “Science is your wingman”.
10

33. DigiD8

34. The welfare state is a form of government in which the state
protects and promotes the economic and social well-being
of the citizens, based upon the principles of equal
opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public
responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the
minimal provisions for a good life. The German term
sozialstaat ("social state") has been used since 1870 to
describe state support programs devised by German
sozialpolitiker ("social politicians").
Which chancellor and Junker first introduced the concept of
welfare state?
11

36. Otto Von Bismarck

37. X is a board game made by San Francisco State University
Professor Ralph Anspach in response to the lessons taught
by the mainstream game, which he believed created the
impression that __________ were something desirable. His
intent was to demonstrate how harmful __________ could
be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work
to curtail them in the real world.
The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust
the Trust, but the title was changed to X.
12

39. Anti Monopoly

40. P is a British firm that uses AI to quickly identify and
develop treatments for rare diseases. Its technology aims to
find novel uses for drugs and combinations of drugs that
are already available.
It recently raised $56 million to support its clinical trials and
drug development. The company will use the funds to test
therapies for Fragile X Syndrome, a leading cause of autism
that has no approved treatments.
It’s worth noting that P’s co-founder Dr. David Brown has
invented several drugs that have made it to market
including a very famous one which was originally intended
for high blood pressure.
Id P and also what drug did David co-invent?
13

42. Healx and Viagra

43. In 2012, Matthew Walzer, a then high school junior with
cerebral palsy, sent a note to Nike: “My dream is to go to
the college of my choice,” he wrote, “without having to
worry about someone coming to tie my shoes every day.”
Sensing an opportunity to create a new footwear category
Nike created the Flyease 8, a LeBron James–branded
basketball shoe with a ___ _______ fastening mechanism
that drew inspiration from “opening and closing a door,”
says Tobie Hatfield, the shoe’s head designer. To tie the
shoe, wearers yank on a strap, which zips around the ankle
as they pull.
What does the design specifically help in achieving?
14

45. Instead of having to use both hands to accomplish
this task, something that may not be possible or easy
for some, Flyease simplifies this by letting them rely
on one hand to open or close the shoe.

46. W used to run the French-Japanese strategic alliance among three
renowned automobile companies X, Y and Z. It is a complicated
partnership-not-a-merger between the three car makers that sells more
metal than everyone other than Toyota and Volkswagen Group. The
Alliance was first formed in 1999 but adopted its current name in
September 2017; an year after X acquired a controlling interest in Y and
subsequently made it an equal partner in the Alliance.
In November 2018, W was arrested by Japanese police on charges of
financial misconduct and was replaced as the head of both X and Y. On
December 29, he managed to flee the country for Lebanon. The most
surprising thing was his method of escape. Initial reports suggested that he
had been hiding in a box meant to contain musical instruments for a band
that played at his house.
Name W, X, Y, Z
15

48. W=Carlos Ghosn, X=Nissan, Y=Mitsubishi, Z=Renault

49. The X saga was an infamous legal battle that kicked off in 2012, when X
sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their
subscribers “stealing” certain content.
X made money by something called Y, where they sued people who
downloaded a specific kind of content that was uploaded to torrent sites
by X. Once they unmasked a downloader, they pressurized their targets to
agree to out-of-court settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather
than facing a courtroom process. Through this, the company netted more
than $6 million between 2010 and 2013. The content in question was
created by fraudulent shell companies, and X uploaded those supposed
companies’ content to various torrent sites.
The founder of X was recently sentenced to 5 years in prison, and he
admitted to making “stupid decisions”.
Id X and Y
16

51. X – Prenda Law ; Y – Porn Trolling

52. X is a pretty intense hardware device marketed by Amazon, for the
sole purpose of data migration from a customer’s local data center
to the AWS data centers. It weighs 50 pounds, is weatherproof and
can withstand a force up to 6g wihout taking damage.
For needs of a bigger scale, Amazon has also launched Y, an
exabyte-scale data tranfer service used to move extremely large
amounts of data to AWS. Essentially, Y is a large ass truck that can
help you move upto 100 PB (Petabytes) of data in a single trip.
DigitalGlobe is one of the many companies that have ‘moved to the
cloud’ using services like these, and just like the Amazon Glacier,
the names of these products are ‘Cold’ themed, following Amazon’s
consistent naming convention.
17

54. X – Snowball
Y – Snowmobile

55. XY is a licensed brand that seeks to engage the private sector
in raising awareness and funds to help eliminate HIV/AIDS in
eight African countries. It is licensed to partner companies
including Nike, American Express, Apple Inc., The Coca-Cola
Company, Starbucks, Converse, Electronic Arts, Penguin
Classics, Gap, Armani, Hallmark, SAP, Beats Electronics, and
Supercell. The latest edition to the partnership is the XY
version of iPhone 11.
It is often stylized as (X)Y or (Y).
ID XY
18

57. Product RED

58. X is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language
processing (NLP) pre-training. Google says X helps better
understand the nuances and context of words in searches and
better match those queries with more relevant results as it is
bidirectional. It was the most successful model until recently when
Baidu released Y.
When Baidu researchers began developing Y, they wanted to build
on the masking technique. But they realized they needed to tweak it
to accommodate the Chinese language. So the researchers trained
Y on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters
rather than single ones. As a result, Y has a greater grasp of how
words encode information in Chinese and the researchers very
quickly discovered that this approach actually works better for
English, too.
X and Y are also names of characters of an American children's
television series but ironically they are operated by people.
19

60. BERT and ERNIE

61. The XY, a bright yellow, slimy, shell-less mollusk commonly
found on the redwood forest floor, is the official mascot for
UC Santa Cruz.
Colin Howard, an 18-year-old student at the University made
an app called XZ, a play on the university’s mascot. The app is
marketed as a game "involving Xs and Zs." Users tap tiles that
alternate between images of Xs and electrical Zs, the goal
being to clear the screen of all Xs.
It was discovered by the authorities that Howard developed
the app to distribute narcotics and other contraband to local
customers as the term Z is also a street name for a drug
supplier.
XZ?
20

64. Banana Plug

65. As the legend goes, in 1978-79, _______ ______ was riding the
train to work. It was then he saw a fellow passenger trying to
amuse himself with a small LCD pocket calculator to get rid of
his boredom. It dawned upon ______ that there might be a
way to do something considerably more fun with the same
basic technology and even add some practical functionality to
it. He intended to create a device that was portable and could
be used by both adults and children for entertainment. With
this idea, _____ teamed up with his creative partner and
created X. X, released in 1989, became an overnight success
and cemented the company’s place in the American markets,
something it had long struggled with.
Id X
21

67. Game Boy

68. The company traces its history back to 1860, with the publication by
Henry Varnum of ”History of Railroads and Canals in the United
States”. This book compiled comprehensive information about the
financial and operational state of U.S. railroad companies. In 1868,
Henry Varnum established H.V. and H.W. ____ Co. with his son, Henry
William , and published two annually updated hardback guidebooks,
Y's Manual of the Railroads of the United States and Y's Directory of
Railway Officials.
In 1906, Luther Lee Blake founded the X Statistics Bureau, with the
view to providing financial information on non- railroad companies.
Instead of an annually published book, X Statistics would use 5" × 7"
cards, allowing for more frequent updates In 1941, X and Y merged
together to form a company that we know today.
Name the company.
22

70. Standard & Poor's (S&P)

71. In 1922, two former Tufts engineering college roommates
Laurence K. Marshall and Vannevar Bush, along with scientist
Charles G. Smith, founded the American Appliance Company
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company’s first product
was a gaseous (helium) rectifier that was based on Charles
Smith’s earlier astronomical research of the star Zeta Puppis.
The electron tube was christened with the name which means
“light of/from the gods” which later became their company’s
new name.
Which company?
23

73. Raytheon

74. Google has partnered with Delaware-based beer maker Dogfish Head to
create a Pangaea-inspired beer called X.
Dogfish Head founder and president Sam Calagione says the limited edition
brew was named after the thinking that the shapes of the continents can be
fit together like puzzle pieces. "It’s what Google does every day -- take a
fractured world of information and put it into something cohesive and
whole," he says.
Google received more than 100 ingredient ideas for X from Google offices
around the world. The final recipe for the Belgian Dubbel style beer includes
things like wattleseed from Australia, amaranth from South America, green
roobios tea from Africa, Myrica Gale from Europe and even Google Honey,
which comes from Mountain View, California, where the company keeps
bees at its headquarters.
Identify X.
24

76. URKontinent