Galaxy 2014 General Quiz

General Quiz – Galaxy 2014
Anurag Dash

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Written
• 10 questions
• 5 points each

1
• FC Barcelona signed a
new sponsorship deal in
December 2013 with
this company.

2. Newspaper ad celebrating whose
achievement

Answer
• Brendon McCullum becoming the first NZ
player to score a triple hundred in tests

3
• This is a quote by one Alcides Ghiggia:
• “Only three people have ever silenced
200,000 people at the X with a single gesture:
Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II and I”
• What did he do?

• 1950 World Cup goal at Maracana defeating
Brazil to win the tournament

4
• Initially, X wrote it as a novella titled ‘The
Fireman’. He retitled it after the publishers asked
him to write a longer version for publication as a
novel, and he did so in the basement of the local
library. He came up with an idea about the new
title, but initially he couldn't find answers about
the temperature at which book paper catches fire
and burns, so he finally decided to call the fire
department, and the guy who answered left the
phone for a moment, then came back with
“______________“. Which book?

5
• Which word means the opposite of
ambidextrous?

• Ambisinister or ambilevous

6
• This is a song from the death metal band
‘Hatebeak’. What is unique about it?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXKR9E
WhXo (Played the audio from 0:25 – 1:15)

• The lead singer is a 21-year-old Congo African
Grey Parrot. The song is Bird Seeds of
Vengeance

• Western and Eastern end of Great Wall of
China

8
• Pritzker Prize
• Turing Award
• Right Livelihood Award
• Vautrin Lud Prize
• W. Wallace McDowell Award
• Abel Prize
• Fields Medal
• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize
• Polar Music Prize
• Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science
• Holberg Prize

Answer
• List of prizes known as the Nobel of a field

9
• Andrew "Andy" Armstrong had six children.
He worked as a jazz musician and truck driver
for Safeway Inc. to support his family. He died
of esophageal cancer on September 10, 1982.
• Which song was written as a memorial to
him?

Answer
• "Wake Me Up When September Ends"

10
• X was written by Hans Christian Anderson as a
love letter to one Edvard Collin. Anderson, upon
hearing of Collin’s engagement to a young
woman, proclaimed his true love to him. Edvard
turned Anderson down, disgusted. He then wrote
X to symbolize his inability to have Collin just as
the lead character cannot be with a human.
• X, as it was originally written, did not have a
happy ending.

Infinite Pounce/Bounce
• +10 for bounce, +10/-5 for pounce
• Nobody answers question goes to the next
team

1
• Approximately 80 are randomly selected "at birth"
from thousands and are trained to handle loud noises,
flash photography and large crowds. From the 80, the
20 largest and best-behaved are chosen and eventually
narrowed down to two finalists. Because most of these
are bred and raised for size at the expense of longer
life, they are prone to health problems associated with
obesity such as heart disease, respiratory failure and
joint damage.
• The finalists for 2013 were named Popcorn and
Caramel, for 2012 were named Cobbler and Gobbler
and for 2011 were named Liberty and Peace.

National Thanksgiving Turkey
Presentation

2
• Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game
created by Richard Garfield and first published in
1993 by Wizards of the Coast.
• In late 2006, programmer Jed McCaleb thought of
building a website for users of the online version
of the game to let them trade cards like stocks.
However, after a few months he moved on to
other projects and decided it was not worth his
time.
• What was the domain name he used?

Mt. Gox
• Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange

3
• As early as 1500 B.C., the Egyptians had
developed an advanced sundial. A T-shaped bar
placed in the ground, this instrument was
calibrated to divide the interval between sunrise
and sunset into 12 parts. Which feature of human
body is believed to be the reason behind
choosing 12?
• 360o in a circle, 60 minutes equaling 1 hour and
60 seconds equaling 1 minute are derived from
which aspect of Babylonian civilization?

Answer
• the number of finger joints on each hand
(three in each of the four fingers, excluding
the thumb)
• Sexagesimal (base-60) number system

4
• X was released in the year 1928 with lead
character named Y. Even though there are
strong arguments that X has fallen into public
domain, amendments to Copyright Act have
extended the duration of copyright twice due
to which this graph (next slide) is called Y
curve.

Answer
• Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse

5
• Mulk Raj Anand’s novel, Untouchable, published in
1935 is the story of a single day in the life of Bakha
who accidentally bumps into a member of a higher
caste.
• During the course of the day, Bakha talk to a Christian
missionary, listens to a speech about untouchability by
Mahatma Gandhi and a subsequent conversation by
two educated Indians, but by the end of the book
Anand suggests that it is technology that may be his
saviour.
• What technology is he talking about?

Answer
• Bakha was a toilet cleaner. The technology is
‘flush toilets’

6
• The company X had set up a stand at the American
exhibition in Moscow in 1959. Nearby, Nikita
Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon got into a
famous debate. During the heated debate, an X
employee offered Khrushchev their product. Later, X
got exclusive rights to the Soviet market in return for
exclusive distribution rights for Stolichnaya vodka in
the U.S.
• However, due to the limitations of vodka market in US,
Soviet Government gave X 17 submarines, a cruiser, a
frigate and a destroyer which was resold for scrap.
• Id X.

7
• Some of the hypothesis for this phenomenon,
also called vibranxiety, are:
• Because we almost always anticipate some
sort of technological interaction, some
unrelated stimuli are interpreted this way.
• It is a real sensation to due electrical signals
coming through in a transmission, touching on
the surrounding nerves.
• What is being talked about?

Answer
• phantom vibration syndrome
• The feeling that your cell phone is vibrating
even though it is not

8
• D12, an initialism for The Dirty Dozen, is an
American hip hop group from Detroit that had
chart-topping albums in the United States,
United Kingdom, and Australia.
• The band consisted of 6 members. Which
famous pop culture element resulted out of
this discrepancy?

Answer
• Alter Ego
– Proof was Dirty Harry
– Bizarre was Peter S. Bizarre
– Kuniva was Hannz G. (which later became Rondell
Beene)
– Kon Artis was Mr. Porter
– Bugz was Robert Beck
– Eminem was Slim Shady

9
• In 2007, when X announced plans to purchase
the man-made island called Sealand. Michael
Bates, Prince and heir to Sealand, said in a he
has no intention of selling his micronation to
any cause that violates international treaties.
• The group X which has had repeated run-ins
with law had set up a campaign to raise
money to buy the self-declared sovereign
nation.

10
Life magazine issue of 21 April 1947 carried an article titled 'Princes of India' in which
it says:
A few statistics about princes in order. On the average, each prince
has 11 titles
can wear 3 uniforms
has 5.8 wives (or concubines)
procreates 12.6 children
lives in 5 palaces
dies at the age of 54
owns 9.2 elephants
kills 22.5 X during lifetime
possesses 2.8 specially fitted railway carriages
owns 3.4 Y

11
• For a few months, following the release of Rocky IV, a joke
was making rounds in Hollywood. Since Rocky Balboa had
run out of earthly opponents, he would have to fight an
alien if a fifth installment of his boxing series were to be
made. Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas took the joke
seriously and wrote a screenplay based on the joke. The
Thomas script for X was originally titled Hunter. It was
picked up by 20th Century Fox in 1985, and turned over to
producer Joel Silver who, based on his experience with
Commando, seemed the right choice to turn the science
fiction pulp storyline into a big-budget film. Silver enlisted
his former boss Lawrence Gordon as co-producer and John
McTiernan was hired as director for his first studio film.

12
• The Government Pension Fund – Global of Norway is one of the
largest pension funds in the world deriving its financial backing
from oil profits. One of the investment policy is not to invest in
controversial companies belonging to following categories:
o Production of weapons
o Sale of weapons and military material to Burma
o Serious or systematic human rights violations
o Severe environmental damages
o Serious violations of the rights of individuals in situations of war or
conflict
o Other particularly serious violations of fundamental ethical norms
Which is the left out category and which Indian company is on that list
belonging to the missing category?

Answer
• Production of tobacco
• ITC

13
• In 1974 it was observed that his condition was rapidly
deteriorating and it was decided to send him to Paris
for further examination. Like any other tourist, he
needed the proper travelling papers. He was issued an
Egyptian passport on which his occupation was listed
as” King (********).” Arriving at Le Bourget Airport
near Paris, he was received with full military honours,
on a red carpet, like any other visiting head of state.
• One of the reports descibed it thus: “ON AN autumn
day in 1976, a French Air Force plane touched down at
Le Bourget airport just outside Paris. The plane was
carrying one of the world's great statesmen, a famous
war leader in need of urgent medical treatment. “

Answer
• Mummy of Ramesses II

14
• Shizo Kanakuri was a Japanese marathon runner and
one of the early leaders of track and field athletics in
Japan. He has been celebrated as "father of marathon"
in Japan. During the November 1911 domestic
qualifying trials for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics,
although the length of the course was probably only 40
kilometres (25 mi), Kanakuri was reported to have set a
marathon world record of 2 hours, 32 minutes and 45
seconds. He was thus selected as one of the only two
athletes that Japan could afford to send to the event.
• For the Stockholm Olympics, his race completion time
is 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and
20.379 seconds. Explain.

Answer
• Kanakuri, weakened by the long journey from
Japan, and suffering from problems with the local
food, lost consciousness midway through the
race, and was cared for by a farming family. He
returned to Japan without notifying race officials.
Swedish authorities considered him missing for
50 years before discovering that he was living in
Japan and had competed in intervening Olympic
marathons. In 1966, he was contacted by Swedish
Television and offered the opportunity to
complete his run.

15
• In October 2000, Cross Farm Park Celtic striker
Lee Todd had his back to referee at the start of
Cross Farm's Sunday league game against
Taunton East Reach Wanderers, and was
startled by the force with which the whistle
was blown for kick-off. "Fuck me, that was
loud," muttered Todd.
• What resulted?

Answer
• Quickest dismissal at the beginning of a
professional match

16
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gun4erV
V8CM (played this video till 37 sec)
• Why was this video produced by Microsoft?

Answer
• In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed
on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's
new operating system Windows 95, despite
million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter.
The game's popularity prompted Bill Gates to
briefly consider buying id Software, and led
Microsoft to develop a Windows 95 port of Doom
to promote the operating system as a gaming
platform. One such presentation to promote
Windows 95 had Bill Gates digitally superimposed
into the game.

17
• Kotla Dahar is an ancient lake in Haryana that
seasonally floods. Kotla Dahar is a closed basin,
filled only by rain and runoff and without outlets.
Thus precipitation and evaporation alone
determine its water volume. During drought,
oxygen-16, which is lighter than oxygen-18,
evaporates faster, so that the remaining water in
the lake and, consequently, the snails' shells,
become enriched with oxygen-18.
• Why was this in news recently?

Answer
• A University of Cambridge team found a spike
in Oxygen 18 levels between 4000 – 4200
years ago. This is believed to be one of the
reason behind the doom of Indus Valley
Civilization

• Dutch province of Zeeland and New Zealand

12
• Betteridge's law of headlines named after Ian Betteridge, a British
technology journalist, although the general concept is much older.
The observation has also been called "Davis' law" or just the
"journalistic principle".
• Betteridge explained the concept in a February 2009 article,
regarding a TechCrunch article with the headline "Did Last.fm Just
Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?":
• This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline
which ends in a question mark can be answered by _____________.
The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they
know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the
sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

• Difference between sun time and clock time

14. What are these crabs called?

15
• Ar-Rihla, or, Riḥlah (literally "Journey") is a
Classical Arabic term of a quest, with
connotations of a voyage undertaken for the sake
of divine knowledge of Islam. It is also a form of
travel literature based upon the experiences of
the travelers.
• The best known Rihla manuscript is "A Gift to
Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities
and the Marvels of Travelling“. Who wrote it?

16
Graeme Obree (in picture) developed a
specific style of handles (not shown in
picture) which won him the world
championships in 1995. It looked a lot like
a famous superhero. This style was later
banned, not because it resembled
anything. What is this style of handles
popularly known as.

17
• X is the only country in Africa founded by United States
colonization while occupied by native Africans.
Beginning in 1820, the region was colonized by African
Americans from the United States, most of whom were
freed slaves. The colonizers established a new country
with the help of the American Colonization Society, a
private organization whose leaders thought former
slaves would have greater opportunity in Africa.
• X established a government modeled on that of the
United States and named its capital city after a US
President.

18
Mobile phone throwing is an international sport that started in X in the
year 2000. It is a sport in which participants throw mobile phones and
are judged on distance or technique.
There are usually four categories in the sport:
• Original (also called "Traditional"): an over-the-shoulder throw with
the farthest distance winning (best of three)
• Freestyle: contestants get points for aesthetics and creative
choreography
• Team original: up to three competitors have one throw each with
their scores added together
• Junior: for children aged twelve or younger

19
• Chatham Islands (a remote Pacific Ocean
archipelago), in 1850.
• Zedelghem, near Bruges, Belgium, 1931
• Buenas Yerbas, California, 1975
• Britain, Present Day
• Korea in future
• Hawaii further in the future

20
• European countries X and Y were created in 90’s. However,
with their similar names often leads to confusion.
• George W. Bush: “The only thing I know about X is what I
learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to
Texas.” – He actually met the Foreign Minister of Y
• At a news conference in Rome, Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, introduced Y Prime Minister to the crowd of
journalists. “I’m very happy to be here today with the Prime
Minister of X.”
• Staff of X and Y embassies meet once a month to exchange
wrongly-addressed mail.

Answer
• Slovakia rose from the Czechoslovakia,
Slovenia from Yugoslavia

18
• In 1712, the British imposed a newspaper tax
that was solely based on the number of pages
in the publication. What resulted due to this?

Answer
• Broadsheet
• Other newspaper sizes – Tabloid, berliner,
Compact

19
• Talking about his paper “Attractive photons in a quantum
nonlinear medium” published in Nature, Harvard university
physics professor Mikhail Lukin said:
• “Most of the properties of light we know about originate
from the fact that photons are massless and do not
interact. What we have done is create a special type of
medium in which photons interact with each other so
strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind
together to form molecules. It's not an in-apt analogy to
compare this to X. When these photons interact with each
other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The
physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to
what we see in the movies”

20
• One of the reasons for cricket’s sharp rise in popularity in
Afghanistan is its resemblance to an old Afghan game shown
below:

21
• The 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil video game
contains all of the 203 national teams that
took part in the 2014 FIFA World Cup
qualification process. The national teams of
Bhutan, Brunei, Guam and Mauritania opted
not to take part and hence are not featured.
Which other FIFA member (a sovereign
republic) did not take part in the qualifying
process?

22
• The "Starion" name is
claimed by Mitsubishi to
be a contraction of "Star
of Orion“. Given that
some other Mitsubishi
models were named Colt,
Lancer and Chariot, there
was an urban legend
regarding the mistake in
naming of the car. What
was the intended name?

23
• One of the eye witnesses, Dallas resident Marie Ellen
Dodge said that she was photographing the strange squinty
man staring at something behind the president at the Book
Depository. “The focus in his eyes, you could feel it,” Dodge
recalls. “He wasn’t angry, but he was glaring. Intent.”
• “He had his hands raised. I heard the second shot, and then
I saw the bullet. I saw the actual bullet. It just kind of hung
in there in mid-air for a second, and then zipped away.
Toward the limousine.
• This and the trajectory of the bullet (shown in the next
slide) acted as circumstantial evidence in this man’s trial for
murder of JFK.

Answer
• Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr

24. Where has such graffiti come up
recently and why?

Answer
• Turkey. These are Google’s Public DNS
numbers, one of the ways Turkish Internet
users can get around the Twitter ban. The man
pictured is Turkey’s PM Erdogan.

25. Connect
• Bolivia
• China
• Colombia
• Dominican Republic
• Georgia
• Marshall Islands
• Saudi Arabia
• USA
• Solomon Islands
• Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)
• Philippines
• Saint Lucia

Answer
• Countries named after people

26
• The cricket test, also known as Tebbit test, was
a controversial phrase coined in April 1990 by
the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit in
reference to the perceived lack of loyalty of
immigrants and their children from South Asia
and the Caribbean. Tebbit suggested that
those who failed this test are not significantly
integrated into the United Kingdom. What was
this test?

Answer
• Which team they supported in a cricket match
vs England

27
• Lucky Dragon 5 was a tuna fishing boat, which
was exposed to and contaminated by nuclear
fallout from the United States' Castle Bravo
thermonuclear device test on Bikini Atoll, on
March 1, 1954. Aikichi Kuboyama, the boat's
chief radioman, died less than seven months
later, on September 23, 1954, suffering from
acute radiation syndrome.
• What, which came out on November 3 1954 and
has been around since then, was partly inspired
from the above event?

Answer
• Godzilla movie’s opening scene

28
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!
• First stanza of which
poem and why was it in
news in February

Answer
• America the Beautiful, Coke super Bowl ad

29
• Johnnie Cochran was an American lawyer best
known for his leadership role in the defense
and criminal acquittal of O. J. Simpson. He was
the inspiration for a fictional character who
had same initials as him.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_apIbm
sUwU

Answer – Jackie Chiles, Seinfeld

30
• Following Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's
December 26 visit to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, the
Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom wrote in
an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph: "If militarism is like the
haunting X of Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is a
kind of Y, representing the darkest parts of that
nation's soul.“
• It was followed by another published by his Japanese
counterpart, Keiichi Hayashi, in the same newspaper,
headlined: "China risks becoming Asia's Y".

31
• X was a British surgeon and a pioneer of
antiseptic surgery. By applying Louis Pasteur's
advances in microbiology, he promoted the idea
of sterile surgery.
• Y is a product which is promoted with the slogan
“Kills germs …”. It was invented in the nineteenth
century as powerful surgical antiseptic. However,
it found success later when it was pitched as a
solution for something else.

Answer
• Joseph Lister, Listerine

32
• Dr Elena Basner, an art curator, worked with
scientists to create a much better way to
detect forged oil paintings. It is based on
presence of strontium-90 and cesium-137 in
the paintings. The isotopes are found in the
types of crops that are used to produce oil
based paints.
• How is this used to detect forgery?

Answer
• Painting made prior to 1945 do not have the
isotopes as these isotopes are not naturally
found. These came into existence after 1945,
since the nuclear explosions.

33
There are several explanations of the phrase X Y’s origin:
- A narrowing of the meaning "suddenly or without
preparation," from X Y being a dish that requires little
preparation
- From the American phrase talk Y meaning "to speak
bluntly with little preparation".
- Some believe the derivation is due the similarity with X
Y carcass - most notably, the cold sweats, goose bumps.
- Reference to the periods after Christmas and
Thanksgiving holidays where X Y was likely to be eaten,
coinciding with the end of those holidays'
characteristically high alcohol consumption

34
X's Conquest of Mars is an 1898 science fiction novel by American astronomer and
writer Garrett P. Serviss. It was written as a sequel to Fighters from Mars, an
unauthorized and heavily altered version of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. It
has a place in the history of science fiction for its early employment of themes and
motifs that later became staples of the genre. The book contains some notable
"firsts" in science fiction: alien abductions, spacesuits, aliens building the
Pyramids, space battles, oxygen pills, asteroid mining and disintegrator rays.
The novel depicts X leading a group of scientists to develop ships and weapons,
including a disintegration ray, for Earth's defense. Also appearing are scientists
such as Edward Emerson Barnard, Lord Kelvin, Wilhelm Röntgen, and Silvanus P.
Thompson, and heads of state such as Queen Victoria, U.S. President William
McKinley, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Emperor Mutsuhito.

35
• The Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage are established by UNESCO
aiming to ensure the better protection of important intangible
cultural heritages worldwide and the awareness of their
significance. The following are the ones from India. Id the missing
one:
• Kutiyattam, Sanskrit Theatre
• The Tradition of Vedic Chanting
• Ramman: religious festival and ritual theatre of the Garhwal
Himalayas
• Mudiyett: a ritual theatre of Kerala
• Kalbelia: folk songs and dances of Rajasthan
• Chhau dance: a tradition from eastern India
• Buddhist chanting of Ladakh
• Nauroz

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