One Zone to rule them all

Well, I have to say that I did rather enjoy yesterday evening’s quiz. If I sound surprised, well, it doesn’t reflect very well on me, but it’s because I really wasn’t expecting to. The setter only does a quiz once or twice a year. The setter seems to be strictly a social quizzer. Now, there’s no natural law which says that if you are not a good quizzer you cannot make a good quiz. In practice, though, I would say that you’re less likely to make a good quiz.

Put the rotten fruit down and hear me out on this.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, let me state the purpose of making a quiz for the rugby club. It’s to give everyone playing in it or listening to it a good evening’s entertainment. If you do that, people will come again and come regularly, and provide the pub/club with a steady income on an otherwise slack week night. Everybody wins.

Well, doing this does require following some basic principles and not falling into some of the basic errors a question master can fall. Now, the best thing you can do to provide this entertainment is a wide variety of questions, of a variety of difficulties. Something for everyone.

Okay, so last night’s QM gave us themed rounds in 3 of the 8 rounds last night. The themes were Germany, China and, well, I forget what the other one was. Now for a themed round to work, you really have to have a feel for the level of the questions that you ask, because the nature of the beast is that you can end up asking questions that are far more difficult than you really want to be asking if you don’t want to turn off a lot of the players. Which I think our setter did last night. But hang on, Dave. Didn’t you say that you actually enjoyed it? Well, yes, because I liked being given the chance to show off knowing the answers to some of the really difficult stuff. Look, I’m not proud of this, but it’s true.

Not all of the questions were hard though. He asked the old chestnut about how many time zones there are in China. Well, I doubt there’s many people reading this who don’t know that it’s just the one. What he didn’t ask (which is just as well because I didn’t know the answer) was when the one time zone was instituted and why? Well I would have guessed the why, but the when was in 1949. Prior to that there were 5 time zones in China. Why the change? Well, as I would have guesed, it was about Chairman Mao’s desire to impose and maintain political, economic and cultural control over the country. There you go.