The King William's College Quiz
If you would like to match wits with the students of King William's College, take a glance at one of the year-end quizzes (which the Guardian calls "the toughest quiz on the planet"). Here are some of the questions (with the answers in parentheses): · "how did we learn about solitary feline ambulation?" (the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling) · who lost "both legs, but returned heroically and was downed at Béthune?" (Douglas Bader) · "where, in Europe, is the Zahringen?" (Berne) I've never heard of Bethune, Douglas Bader, or the Zahringen, and that's the way it was with most of the questions. After a while I just felt inadequate, so I stopped. Via Plep.
posted by Amy @ 6/18/2006 03:04:00 a.m.
2 comments
2 Comments:
If you were my age and grew up in the UK, you would have seen a film (as a child) at end of terms and so on (using those reel projectors) called "Reach for the Sky" starring Kenneth More. Check it out if you can, it is about Douglas Bader, bit of a daredevil, lost his legs in a car crash, got tin legs, and then became a pilot in the RAF in WW2. Very stiff upper lip!
I think I might have just about got the Rudyard Kipling "The cat who walked by himself" but I had no clue about Berne.
These quizzes are all in-crowd stuff though, aren't they? Like the IQ. People get good results if they come from that culture and are trained into the types of questions they are likely to get.
Well, we had the reel projectors here in Saskatchewan (at least in the small towns I grew up in), but we never watched anything about this. If I remember correctly, we mostly watched stupefyingly dull educational programs about animals.
I think you're right about quizzes like this--very much in-crowd stuff.
Post a Comment
<< Home