New Quizzes
Over the latter part of Summer we've added a new section to the website under the heading Trivia Extra. We
wanted to add a lot more categories to the website but at the same time
we didn't want to hide them amongst the hundred or so titles that already exist
on our Quizzes Galore page. I'm actually not very happy
with the website's page structure and perhaps should have given it a
little more thought when designing the site back in 2013. Our regular
visitors may have noticed that we've also recently added a search page
(clickable from the search icon in the top navigation bar) which will
hopefully be helpful if you are looking for a specific subject area. I
already use it to search for duplicate questions!
Writing quizzes for some of the new categories has been fun and
sometimes testing. We try to make every quiz as interesting and original
as possible. However, the imagination did dry up after the first few
questions with some of these new subjects!
There's so much information out there for a World War Two quiz that writing trivia on this topic was easy. And the same could be said when it came to sourcing questions for our Board Games quiz.
I did learn a few new things such as the official grid of the Chinese
strategy game 'Go' comprises 19×19 lines and it's also believed to be
the world's oldest board game continuously played today. Also, I never knew that
the name of the policeman on a monopoly board was Officer Edgar Mallory
(although I did know that the prisoner behind the bars is Jake the
Jailbird!)
Not being a great science fiction fan I found the Doctor Who and Star Wars quizzes a little tougher to write. It's easy to quickly put up the standard (but necessary) questions such as 'what does the acronym TARDIS stand for?', but it becomes a little more difficult in the search for quality and originality when you know little about the subject matter. I hope we got there in the end (smile)? But (and I didn't see it coming!) the biggest struggle was compiling the Dinosaur Quiz. For some reason finding the twenty or so suitable questions for this page, which didn't involve the literal translation of names such as Stegosaurus or Brontosaurus, was a struggle; and far too much time was spent looking out of the window, viewing another wet Summer's day, seeking inspiration! By the way Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus mean 'roof lizard' and 'thunder lizard' respectively (and the quiz doesn't get more exciting than that, I'm afraid!)
Good Quiz Questions?
When people ask me what's my favourite quiz question of all time (or anytime!), I'm afraid I find it more difficult to answer than what's the capital of Sardinia (that's easy, it's Cagliari). I often write down questions on the website which I think could be possible contenders then forget what they are (my memory being the main reason why I will never be a good quizzer!) I think a good question should be one that you can have an educated guess at even if you don't know the answer. One such recent question I put up on the website was 'name the only American mentioned in Hitler's book Mein Kampf?' It's the sort of question that you can guess at even if you don't know the answer. Other not so good but similar questions include 'what colour are post boxes in France?', which again you can guess at but it doesn't have to be such an erudite one! The answers are Henry Ford and the colour yellow.
We go to a local quiz each month which has a high standard of good questions and we rarely come first. A selection of the questions asked this month included 'what is a haboob?', 'in which subject does Theresa May have a degree?', and 'what is an octothorpe?'. The table next to us took an educated guess at Theresa May having a degree in theology (her father was a vicar). The answer is geography and only one of us on our table knew this even though we have some good quizzers in our large group (including a Mastermind semi-finalist). However, anyone could have taken a guess at the answer, even though that guess would unlikely be geography. An 'haboob' is a sandstorm or at least the wind that produces a sandstorm. This was frustrating as I'd heard of this before but just couldn't remember what it was - both a sandstorm and mirage came to mind, and of-course we went with mirage. Finally, what the heck is an octothorpe? Something with eight, mmm, we didn't know! The answer is another term for the hash tag symbol; so we learnt something new there (smile). All three questions made us think rather than shake our heads like when you get asked what's the name of the highest mountain in Germany and you don't know (it's the Zugspitze by the way, which I've actually put on this site (probably more than once) but have just had to look up.)
Local Quizzess
Work is continuing on our local quiz page, so watch this space. We plan to list quizzes which are regularly happening in your local area. Hopefully enough pubs, etc., will get on board to make this a success?
Well, that's our first blog post. I hope you'll pop by this corner of the website and contribute to the comments section below. And we're always on the hunt for a good quiz question to better our 'Henry Ford' contender, so if you have a better one please feel free to tell us in the comments section below!?