General Quiz Finals 2018

Scheme
• Dries 1-- 13 questions
• Written 1--6 questions
• Dries 2--13 questions
• Written 2 – 6 questions
• Infinite Bounce & Pounce - +10/-5

1
• Many of the characters in his iconic work are references to/caricatures of various
real life figures, some of which the author was happy to reveal, others he was at
pains to keep secret. The identity of one of the most iconic characters(X) has proved
to be more elusive than the rest, yet certain clues abound, pointing towards it being
Edward Bouverie Pusey, canon at Christchurch and the author’s patron,one of them
being the way the protagonist formally refers to X, which is likely a reference to
Pusey’s name.
• Another piece of evidence is as follows: In a previous satirical take on Oxford politics
disguised as a math lesson, the author investigates geometric coordinates and
explains, “the locus of EBP [Edward Bouverie Pusey]: this was found to be a species
of Catenary, called the Patristic Catenary.”( the term referring to Pusey being an
expert on the fathers of the Church). The term, in a punning way, fits perfectly into
this dialogue by the protagonist referring to X: “ Well, Ive often seen a ___ without a
____, but a ____ without a ___! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”, a
catenary being the shape fitting the bolded region.
• Who was this character that was inspired by E B Pusey?

2
• Here's a certain Mr.Woodland talking about how the idea for this
invention came to his mind while sitting on Miami beach-
"I remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when I poked my
four fingers into the sand and, for whatever reason—I didn’t know—I
pulled my hand toward me and I had four lines. I said ‘Golly! Now I
have four lines and they could be wide lines and narrow lines, instead
of dots and dashes. Now I have a better chance of finding the
doggone thing.’ Then, only seconds later, I took my four fingers—they
were still in the sand—and I swept them round into a circle.”
• Id the invention.

Bar Code/Universal Product Code

3
• The Love Letter is a 17th-century genre
painting by Johannes Vermeer. On September 23,
1971, this painting was stolen from its display at
The Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, by 21 year old
Mario Pierre Roymans.
• Later , he arranged a secret meeting with a news
reporter & told that he actually loved art, but also
loved humanity. After the encounter, the pictures
were published, alongside Roymans' conditions: 200
million Belgian francs to be given to certain sect of
people. He also requested the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam and the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels
organize campaigns in their respective countries to
raise money to combat world famine.
• What was the main inspiration (something which
happened in the neighbouring continent) for this
theft?

4
• The concept that decreasing atmospheric pressure predicts stormy
weather, postulated by Lucien Vidi, provides the theoretical basis for a
weather prediction device called a "weather glass" or a "______
barometer".
• It is named after the renowned German who developed a simple but
effective weather ball barometer using the principles developed
by Torricelli.
• He was the first one to prove the presence of incisive bone across
mammals ,had his own theory of Colours and published a book titled
Metamorphosis of Plants containing pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas , in
1790.
• Who is this polymath , popular for a 2-part work about a commonly
quoted immoral deal , first of which was released in 1808?

5
• Presidents Park is a currently defunct wooded retreat in the Black Hills of
South Dakota, where citizens can stroll peacefully among the 43 giant
heads of the Nation's Presidents.
• The park opened in 2003 features 43 heads sculpted by David Adickes
arranged chronologically along a path winding up into a rocky knoll of tall
pines.
• The Park has interspersed a couple of joke items along the way. A path
twist at McKinley features a sign: "Turn of the Century." Visitors can sit on
"Monica Rock." There is a Watergate picnic area behind Nixon's head.
• Then , what are the restrooms/toilets appropriately named? (eg:He-She)

6
• Among the umpteen number of gifts the royal couple Meghan Markle
& Prince Harry received , a company named Bags of Love , making
personalized equipment reportedly gifted the couple a matching
combo, hoping they would use them on their honeymoon.
• But , it's highly unlikely that they use it since it's illegal for the couple
to accept gifts which have a commercial angle and this gift would
have been sent back like many other 'illegal' gifts.
• What was the gift which would prove as a golden opportunity for
paparazzis if it was used by the couple?

Bikini and swimming trunk combo

7
• Animated film-makers usually turn to paintings for inspiration when they
are designing landscapes , animals...etc.
A famous 2005 franchise-spawning movie used
French painter Henri Rousseau's exotic paintings to create the surroundings
in the movie.
• According to the production designer Kendal Cronkhite-
"Jungles used in films are usually claustrophobic, mysterious and
frightening. We needed a jungle that was exotic, very different from New
York, obviously, but also really friendly and colorful. And Rousseau was
perfect for that, because he kind of has this childlike view of a jungle.”
• Which movie are we talking about?

8
• A new research conducted by a Dr.Leonard Sax from Maryland in 2003 suggested
that , this person thought to have died of syphilis caught from prostitutes, was in
fact the victim of a posthumous smear campaign by anti-Nazis.
Dr Sax made his discovery after studying accounts of X's collapse with dementia
in 1889.
• The notes show no signs of the symptoms which are now regarded as evidence of
third stage of syphylis, such as an expressionless face and slurred speech.
• He argues that The doctors at that time were not able to think of an alternative
diagnosis & a more plausible diagnosis would have been a slowly-developing
brain tumour , accounting for the patient's collapse and the migraines and visual
disturbances he suffered.
• Which much talked-about & celebrated person was subject to this defamation
campaign?

9
• In 1883, 17 years before his most famous work came out , X founded
a petroleum company with his brother, Benjamin ____.
• According to American Oil & Gas Historical Society , The ____
brother’s Syracuse, New York business sold “lubricants, oils, greases–
and ‘____’s Castorine, the great axle oil,’”.
Later , he sold the company in 1888 to seek his fortune in other
ventures.
• A beloved mecha-character from his work is supposedly inspired
from his oil background in line with his habit of modelling the
characters on parts of his everyday life & past.
• Who am I talking about ? & Identify the character also.

10
• Harvey Weinstein wanted to seriously scale back Princess
Mononoke’s 134-minute running time for the U.S. release, but
Miyazaki didn’t want a single frame altered. So, the film's producer
sent a ______ _____ to Weinstein’s office with a two-word message
inscribed on it: “No cuts.”
• Miyazaki said in an interview with The Guardian. “I did go to New York
to meet this man, this Harvey Weinstein, and I was bombarded with
this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts. I defeated him.”
• What did the producer send?

11
• What are these Lego figures ,originally posted by blogger Legofesto in
August 2006 ,based on?(Be specific)

12
• Trevor Paglen's "_______ Reflector” is a 100-foot-long, diamond-shaped
polyethylene structure coated with titanium dioxide so shiny that it looks
like mylar.
• Supported by the design firm Global Westsern and Reno’s Nevada Museum
of Art, it raised nearly $76,000 last year on its Kickstarter page.
• But it's planned launch is facing criticism from a different field because of
the possible hindrance it will create to their research.
But ironically , creations by the same field continue to hinder their work ,
pointed out by the artist in defense.
• So , why is this artwork creating a headache for this group of people ,
working in distant & uninhabited areas like Atacama desert & Mouna Kea?

Going to be launched into space - might interfere
with the vision of Observatories/Large Telescopes

13
• A queen once had seven brothers who loved her dearly. They couldn’t
stand the plight of it and decided to end it by deceiving her. They
made a fire at the nearby hill and asked their sister to see the glow.
The sister was assured that it was something else and she stopped
whatever she was doing.
• What was she doing? Of which tradition is this a backstory of?

Karva Chowth
• She was fasting and she thought the light to be that of the moon. This
is the tradition behind the karva chowth.

Written - Artoons
• 6 Artoons worth 10 points each
• Bonus 10 for getting all 6 correct

14
• Due to the need of the time, In the summer of 1939 , Hungarian
physicist Leo Szilard decided to visit X at his summer home on Long
Island. Because he could not drive a car, he asked Y to drive him up.
• "It was a little difficult to find X," Y wrote later. "Several inquiries
failed to elicit the whereabouts of this obscure personage. In the end
we asked a young girl not yet 10 years of age, with two fairly long
braids, who responded positively to an inquiry about a nice old
gentleman with plenty of white hair.”
• Whom were they visiting , and who served as the chauffeur , who
would be hailed as the father of something quite opposite in
mechanism to the invention this meeting catalyzed.

Albert Einstein & Edward Teller

15
• This is a painting titled
Chichester Canal by JMW
Turner , painted in 1828
and currently housed in the
Tate collection.
• What does the
atmosphere(upper half of
the painting) and the Color
scheme represent -
aftermath of something
which happened more than
a decade before the
painting was made?

Ash from Mt.Tambora explosion [1815] ,
leading to year without summer

16
• Chinatown(1974) had a jerky production , with disagreements among
the producer - director - writer trio and fights between Faye Dunaway
& Roman Polanski.
• Initially , the movie was supposed to have a happy ending rather than
the actual ending where Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) gets shot
while driving a car.
• Why did Polanski insist on a dark ending - owing to a personal
incident which happened the previous decade and was a hot topic in
the media?

Sharon Tate's murder by Manson family
• She was married to Polanski at that time
• And a main plot point of Tarantino’s new
multistarrer movie

17
• BlacKkKlansman is a 2018 American biographical comedy-drama
film directed by Spike Lee , based on the 2014 memoir Black
Klansman by Ron Stallworth. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot
follows the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs
police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local
chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
• It was theatrically released in the United States on August 10, 2018,
to both critical & commercial success.
What was the main reason / intention behind releasing the film
around this time period?

To coincide with the anniversary of Unite the
Right/Charlottesville rally

18
• German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann was working in Royal
College of Chemistry , London during the 1850s looking to synthesise
quinine, which is used in the treatment of malaria. Quinine was solely
obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree that was grown in plantations
in southeast Asia, making it desirable to produce the substance artificially.
• One of his students was toiling over the Easter holidays in 1856, trying to
meet his instructor’s objective of making quinine. He instead ended up
with a series of failed experiments and on occasions, beakers full of muck.
During such an occasion , the sludge in his beaker reacted with alcohol and
created a visually dazzling product.
• This is the story behind what discovery?

First Synthetic Dye by Sir William Henry Perkin

19
• Proposed reasons for this anomaly are -relative isolation of the nation
- unlike, say , the former Soviet republics, nobody ever conquered the
country and forced some new <redacted> onto them, and the country
was not really a participant in the Age of Sail , which prompted in the
creation of variants which were understandable from a distance. So
the <redacted> just sort of formed naturally and then stayed the way
it was for a while without outside interference.
• By the 1962 constitution , they had a chance to change & be like the
other entities around the world , but they had no real reason to
change it and it had become immersed in their culture.
• What anomaly am I talking about?

Triangular/double pennant flag of Nepal

20
• The sense “morbid melancholy” to the meaning of the word reflects
the ancient belief that the viscera of the region below the lower rib
cartilages (liver, gall bladder, spleen etc) were the seat of melancholy
and the vapours that caused such feelings.
• The currently more commonly used meaning, is derived from a
narrowing of the sense ‘depression or melancholy without real cause’.
• What term?

21
• Identify these two Americans , carrying the coffin of their Australian
friend - partner in crime during their heroics in Tacoland 50 years ago.

22
• Yellow fever, once endemic in Cuba, was a disease that caused many deaths, especially among
non immune foreigners, like the Spanish soldiers during the ten year war. Its vector was
discovered to be the mosquito Aedes aegypti in the last part of the 19th century. Eventually,
control methods targeted at A. aegypti and urban public health measures led to near complete
control of transmission of the disease.
• However, evidence was accumulating in countries like Colombia and Brazil, about outbreaks
where A. Aegypti was not involved. This was termed the jungle cycle of the disease, and the
vector involved was found to be the mosquito species Haemagogus spegazzinii. Jorge Boshell
made this important discovery, that these mosquitoes spent their winged lives in the forest
canopy, often causing disease to the resident howler monkeys. How this virus spread from the
canopy to the occasional human on the forest floor remained an intractable mystery, until
Jorge happened to observe a certain human activity, the performing of which led to the
humans being surrounded by the little blue mosquitoes. This essentially provided further proof
of the spread of the disease by the jungle cycle.
• How/ what led to the mosquitoes reaching the forest floor and spreasing disease to humans?

Woodcutters cutting down trees. Once the trees
were brought down, the mosquitoes came along
with them

23
• In geomorphology, buttes and mesas are elevated landforms, with
steep, almost vertical sides, and a flat top, buttes having a smaller
area than mesas. Definitions as to the surface areas of mesas and
buttes vary, making it difficultly to exactly classify these landforms
based on area.
• In differentiating between them, Geographers generally use a simple
rule of thumb that is based on the relative proportions of each
individual landform.
• What is this rule?

A mesa is a landform that is wider than it is high
and a butte is a landform that is higher than it is
wide

24
• World of Warcraft released its first expansion pack in 2007, named
The Burning Crusade.
• This introduced certain ‘dances’. Each gender of each race has a
different style of dance. The dances were supposedly inspired from
famous dance videos, e.g. The male Night Elf’s dance resembled
Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean dance.
• The male Draenei’s dance was inspired from something born in this
part of the world in 1998 , later achieving immense international
popularity.

25
• Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. was an American naval officer and explorer ,
active in the first half of 20th century.
• In the fall of 1933 , when he was going on an exploration- he had three
special guests, one of them pregnant - along with him in the ship SS Jacob
Ruppert.
• The speculated reasons for their inclusion was added publicity and further
fundraising in the future because journeys like this were becoming more
'dull' to the public. Another reason was Byrd's personal liking for a
'balanced' and much revered liquid ,sharing its appearance with their
destination , the more fresh & authentic form of which would be available
with the help of the three guests.
• What was so special about this group of three & where was the ship going
to?

26
• The word ______ derives from the French demoiselle, meaning
"young lady". It is an archaic term not used in modern English except
for effect or in expressions such as this. It can be traced back to the
knight-errant of Medieval songs and tales, who regarded protection
of women as an essential part of his chivalric code which includes a
notion of honour and nobility.
• The English term “______ __ ________" itself first appeared in Tobias
Smollett's 1755 translation of Don Quixote, a parody of medieval
chivalry tales.
• Identify the phrase , an overused trope in the world of literature, art,
film and video games.

Written – Wordplay/Pun
• 6 Questions worth 10 points each
• Bonus 10 on getting all correct

1
• A bear was on his usual walk-around through the woods in Chattahoochee-
Oconee National Forest in December 1985 when instead of apples or a
river full of fish, he stumbled upon 40 plastic bags full of the
purest cocaine, leftovers of a failed escape plan by a drug kingpin and,
hungry as it was, he ate it all up, down to the last speck. He died on the
spot & was found lying next to the emptied containers in the middle of the
woods later.
• The poor bear became known as the largest consumer in the Bluegrass
Conspiracy, considered to be the biggest drug smuggling chain at the time
in America.
• What was the nickname ascribed to this unfortunate bear , hinting towards
a popular player in the drug smuggling business?

2
• Taken from Goodreads :
______ _____'s Book of Famous Cats by Pearl Lau provides an inside
look at cats through the centuries and gives us a delightful, yet factual
look at cats who came before in all walks of life: art, literature, as
muse and inspiration for famous owners, and as memorable
marketing tools and spokescats for products now an indispensable a
part of our lives.
• The blanked part is the name of a popular artist who has made some
cat paintings , but gained popularity for a series of paintings based on
something closer to his home in Giverny ,but his first name slightly
tweaked to fit in a common pointed feature found in the felines.
FITB

3
• Aruvi is a 2017 Indian Tamil socio-political drama film. The film
portrays the events that occur in the life of Aruvi (Aditi Balan), a
rebellious young woman who seeks to expose the consumerist and
misogynistic nature of modern civilisation, while attempting to find
meaning during a period of existential crisis , using violence or let's
say , threatening to do so.
• What punny title did The Hindu use for it's review , by just adding a
letter (to include the anger element) to a commonly used term for
movies depicting formative years of teenagers/young adults?

4
• __________ is a VR game designed as the result of a Boston College
project - Players are thrust into what’s been nicknamed Bloomsday—
June 16, 1904, the day an entire novel takes place.
• In the game, users can tool around Dublin and “pick up” 3D objects
like a hat or a gramophone that are central to the novel. As they
explore, they’ll hear an immersive aural environment including
narration, music and readings from the book.
• Arrive at the name of this game , by slightly modifying the name of a
device often used by video gamers?

1
• A bear was on his usual walk-around through the woods in Chattahoochee-
Oconee National Forest in December 1985 when instead of apples or a
river full of fish, he stumbled upon 40 plastic bags full of the
purest cocaine, leftovers of a failed escape plan by a drug kingpin and,
hungry as it was, he ate it all up, down to the last speck.He died on the
spot & was found lying next to the emptied containers in the middle of the
woods later.
• The poor bear became known as the largest consumer in the Bluegrass
Conspiracy, considered to be the biggest drug smuggling chain at the time
in America.
• What was the nickname ascribed to this unfortunate bear , hinting towards
a popular player in the drug smuggling business?

3
• Aruvi is a 2017 Indian Tamil socio-political drama film. The film
portrays the events that occur in the life of Aruvi (Aditi Balan), a
rebellious young woman who seeks to expose the consumerist and
misogynistic nature of modern civilisation, while attempting to find
meaning during a period of existential crisis , using violence or let's
say , threatening to do so.
• What punny title did The Hindu use for it's review , by just adding a
letter to a commonly used term for movies depicting formative years
of teenagers/young adults?

Maha Question
• 10 parts to be answered
• 4 points per part
• Bonus 10 points on getting all 10 parts

Mahaquestion
• A is a town in the state of B, in C (country). X, while working at the University of B, A, was
involved in the discovery of ten elements, six of which are mentioned below.
• A’, B’ and C’
• R’ (named because it comes after P’ and Q’, in a reflection of celestial orientation)
• E’ (named after the E couple, the discoverers of F’ and G’)
• X’, named in X’s honour
• Give me elements A’, B, C’, R’, E’ and X’(discovered by X), and P’ Q’ F’ and G’

• A’- Berkelium
• B’-Californium
• C’-Americium
• R’-Plutonium
• E’-Curium
• X’-Seaborgium
• P’-Uranium
• Q’-Neptunium
• F’-Polonium
• G’-Radium

General Quiz Finals 2018

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General Quiz Finals 2018