Yes, it's a post which does exactly what it says on the tin. I just haven't got a lot to say about quizzes at the moment. -Ah! - replies the cynical reader - that's never stopped you droning on about them in the past.- Ouch. Well, anyway, I am determined to try to keep the blog going - once we get to August it will have been a year. So, bearing in mind that it is my turn to be question master on this coming Thursday night's quiz, I thought I'd write a little bit about pet hates in a quiz.
Which is, I suppose, just a little perverse considering that I only usually go to the Thursday quiz at the moment, and relatively few of my pet hates are perpetrated here. Still, for what it's worth, here goes -
* Family Fortunes questions.
If you haven't encountered Family Fortunes before, it was a TV game show, based on the US original called Family Feud. Two families take turns trying to predict the answers which 100 members of the public will have given to a question like - name a hairy dog -. There's various other rules and regs, but it's the question type that I'm really talking about here. I'm really sorry, but my heart sinks every time a question master asks a question of this type. Why? Well, basically, I don't like pure guessing games. I like questions where you either:-
a) Know the answer
b) Don't know the answer - but can work out an answer that has a chance of being right, through using what you do know to help you work out what you don't know.
Now, if we go back to our example hairy dog question, can you really apply what you know to work out whether more people will have answered labrador than German shepherd , poodle or Old English sheepdog? Or any one of half a dozen other breeds for that matter?
* Whytheell Questions
This is a term I invented, and it applies as in 'Why-the-hell is he/she asking this' questions. I grant you, this is a genre that covers a multitude of sinful questions, but on the same hand I think you probably know what I mean. Things like "What was the cost of a colour TV license in February of 1973?" It's the sort of thing which you just can't see anyone knowing, because there really is no conceivable benefit from knowing it, and as a fact it is not interesting enough of itself to make the knowing of it in any way worthwhile.
* Wrong'uns
Basically this is a genre of question that has an easy to get answer which is wrong, and a much more difficult and obscure answer that is right. For example - the design of Tinkerbell in the Walt Disney animated Peter Pan was based on which actress? Now you know damn well that the QM is going to tell you that it was Marilyn Monroe. Well and good - except it wasn't. It was Margaret Kelly. Who? She was an actress - just not a very well known one. But if that was the answer that the QM wanted, he would never have asked it in the first place.
Well, I'd like to think that I've avoided any wrong'uns or whytheells for this Thursday, and at least I can guarantee that there won't be any Family Fortunes.
2 comments:
Well Dave, on the subject of wrong questions, many years ago, I took part in a charity quiz night for the National Autistic Society. One of the questions that night was "What is the smallest number with an 'A' in its name?". The official answer was 'one thousand', but the alternate correct answer my team, and a few others as well, gave was 'one hundred and one'. There was quite a lot of outcry! I don't remember exactly what happened afterwards, but I think maybe both answers were accepted as correct in the end.
Worth noting that, around the same time, a question on UC had gone along the lines of "The smallest number with an 'A' in its name is 'one hundred and one'; what is the smallest with a 'B'?" (One billion being the answer there)
Hi Jack,
I will admit - my first thought was - does this include the 'and'? IN the USA I don't think it would - they tend to leave out the and.
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