On May 24, there was Mahaquizzer. On May 30, the Chandrakant Keni Memorial Goa Quiz. And now, the biggest of them all -- the internationally acclaimed World Quizzing Championship (WQC 09) comes to Goa. The WQC is an annual competition that aims to elect the best quizzer in the world. This year, it is being held simultaneously in 42 locations across 24 countries, including eight venues in India. SEQC's spunky Tallulah D'Silva, through her usual fearless approach, has been successful in bringing this premier event to Goa for the first time ever.
The WQC 09 will be held in Goa on Saturday June 6 at 4pm. Participants will require to be in their seats by 3.30pm, and gates will be closed at 3.50pm. The venue is the CCP Hall, Corporation of the City of Panjim, opposite Central Cafe, off 18 June Road, Panjim. The quiz is open to all, and there are neither registration fees nor age restrictions. It is a solo written quiz, with 240 questions in eight categories -- including some audiovisual questions -- to be answered in a time-span of two hours.
Pre-registration for WQC09 Goa can be done by e-mailing or phoning Tallulah (e-mail: tallulahdsilva@gmail.com; tel: 9823362217). More information is available online at http://www.wqc2009.com.
Here are a few sample questions from WQC08 -- two each from the eight categories of Culture, Entertainment, Sciences, Sport & Games, Lifestyle, Media, History and World -- to whet your appetite:
* In Greek mythology, what was the name of the ship that transported Jason and his friends in their quest to steal the Golden Fleece?
* A Mayan creator deity, a weather god of wind, storm and fire, he caused the Great Flood when the first humans angered the gods. He gives his name to which natural phenomenon?
* Before the 1978 Metro Manila Popular Music Festival, Freddy Aguilar was a complete unknown; afterwards he was the world’s best-known Filipino musician. What brought him fame was a folk-rock ballad sung in Tagalog. Since spawning over 50 covers in 14 languages, what is the song’s title?
* This city in northern Bavaria is closely associated with composer Richard Wagner. The premiere of his Ring Cycle and of his opera Parsifal was staged there and since 1876 it has hosted an annual Wagner music festival - for which enthusiasts can wait years to get tickets. Which city?
* One of the few known carnivorous mushrooms (it kills and digests nematodes), this edible fungus is found around the world and is especially popular in Japanese and Chinese cuisine. What is it called?
* In physics, what name is given to the law that expresses a force as function of the electric charge of two bodies, the square of their distance and the permittivity of free space?
* Which chess term was coined in 1561 by Spanish priest Rúy López de Segura, from the Italian expression meaning 'to put a leg forward', i. e., to trip someone?
* This 1981 Nintendo video game was the first in which the Italian plumber Mario appeared. In the game Mario must save his girlfriend from the clutches of an escaped ape who keeps throwing barrels and fireballs at him. What was the name of this classic video game?
* Named ‘Gayetty’s Medicated Paper’, US businessman Joseph C. Gayetty was the owner of the first factory produce and package it for sale in the Western world. In 1879 the Scott Paper Company was in the first to market it in the form we know it today. Originally, however, made for the purpose by the Chinese, what is this specific product?
* Born in Guinea she became the face of Yves Saint-Laurent in the 1980s before stepping off the catwalk to launch a campaign against female genital mutilation. The body of which former top model - one of the first African-born women to attain supermodel status - was found floating in the Seine a month after she disappeared early in 2008?
* Often referring to a university level or post-graduate Islamic school; which word, in its original Arabic version, simply means (a) ‘place of learning’?
* Nobel laureate and world famous author Ernst Hemingway wrote in one of his novels about the war in Italy where, as an ambulance driver in the American Red Cross, he himself experienced the horrors of war. He was wounded in the legs by a bomb blast and hospitalized in Milan. What was the title of this novel?
* In 2007 Kazakhstan’s government secured a multi-million dollar loan from the World Bank to help save an inland sea that was once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water. The UN have said the disappearance of this sea is the world’s worst man-made environmental disaster. What is the name of this sea?
* Whose brave refusal in 1955 to surrender her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama triggered a bus-boycott and the beginning of the modern U.S. civil rights movement?
* For some, the summit of luxury travel is a trip on the Orient Express. Although many routes use the name, the original service went between Paris and which other city?
* ‘Smiling Buddha’ was the codename of what event that took place near the town of Pokhran on 18 May 1974?
If you enjoyed that, you can download the entire set of questions -- and their answers -- by going to the following URL, and clicking on the file named wqc2008.zip:
http://groups.google.com/group/seqc-goa/files/
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