British Quiz Championship 2000
Alexandra Palace, London
21-22 August 2000

PRELIMINARY ROUND

1. On which number anniversary is it traditional to give Fruit or Flowers ?



2. Which Anglo-Irish composer and conductor counted Vaughan Williams, Sir Arthur Bliss and Gustav Holst among his pupils. His five Irish Rhapsodies were his most popular works and he was knighted in 1901?



3. In which Marx Brothers film did Groucho sing 'Lydia the Tattooed Lady'?



4. What name is given to the line that divides the illuminated and shaded portions of an astronomical body such as a planet or moon?



5. First seen on stage in 1947, which character is Marcel Marceau's most celebrated creation?



6. What name is given to the technique of treating the surface of a lens with magnesium fluoride or other substances to reduce internal reflection and increase light transmission?



7. At which specific location could you see The Brazen Serpent, The Punishment of Haman and David Slaying Goliath?



8. Named in honour of a Portuguese navigator, what was the name of the space probe that in 1990 sent back the first high-resolution radar images of the planet Venus?



9. Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" in which strips of oilcloth in imitation of chair caning are stuck onto the surface of the work is an example of which artistic technique?



10. What is the name given to a certain species of bat owing to the shape of the ridge on it's nose ?



11. Who stood as American presidential candidate for the Bull Moose Party in 1912, effectively splitting the Republican vote and ensuring Wilson's election?



12. Who were the two protagonists at the battle of Blood River in 1836?



13. Although Anu was the highest god in the Sumerian pantheon. Which god, sometimes called the Lord of the Air, is often cited as the most important deity and King of the Sumerian gods ?



14. The first two Perfect Numbers are 6 and 28 but what is the third?



15. What is the nickname of the railway engines with a wheel configuration of 2-8-2 so-called because the first ones were made in the USA for export to Japan?



16. Chang Kai Shek International Airport is situated in which capital city?



17. In behavioural science, what name is given to the application of mathematical and statistical concepts to psychological data, particularly the areas of mental testing and experimental data?



18. The year 2001 is the Chinese Year of which creature?



19. On board ship, at what time does the Morning Watch commence?



20. Although the names of the four Scottish Quarter Days have remained the same, on which same ordinal date of the respective months have they now changed?



21. Who played the part of Alfie in the 1975 film 'Alfie Darling'?



22. What was the name of the 1986 sequel to the 1979 film 'Alien'?



23. England cricketer Andrew Caddick was born in which country?



24. Which same real Christian name is shared by Laurence Binyon, Erskine Childers, and Graeme Pollock?



25. Who gave his name to an air-brake for railways which he invented when aged 16?



26. Actress Sinead Cusack is married to which Oscar-winning actor?



27. Spell the word beginning with the letter 'p' that means sleight of hand and derives its name from the French for nimble fingers?



28. Which pop star had the real name of Ernest Evans?



29. Wear would an ancient Athenian tragic actor have worn a buskin?



30. Rijsttafel is a rice-based mixed dish from which country?



31. Who was the beaten finalist in the Embassy World Snooker Championship at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield in May 2000?



32. Which novel by Sir Walter Scott is subtitled 'Or the Astrologer'?



33. What was the name of the Number One hit of 1994 for Stiltskin?



34. What is the second month of the French Revolutionary calendar, corresponding to the period 23 October to 21 November, its name meaning 'mist'?



35. What number on the Beaufort Scale represents a whole gale?



36. 'Where's Harry' is the appropriately entitled autobiography of whom?



37. 'At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general' is the first line of which best-selling book?



38. Pteroylglutamic Acid, a vitamin of the B complex, is more commonly known as what?



39. Which 17th century mathematician stated that light travelling between two points seeks a path such that the number of waves is equal to that of neighbouring paths?



40. Who wrote the novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' the basis of the screenplay for the film 'Blade Runner'?



41. Sometimes known as the white whale, Delphinapterus leucas belongs to the bottle-nosed family of whales; how is it more generally known?



42. Born about 1489 Antonio Allegri was one of the leading artists of the renaissance. His works included Jupiter and Antiope and Ecce Homo. During his life, and since, he has been known by one name, that of the small town near Parma where he was born. Who was he?



43. For what does the 'K' stand for in the name of the author Philip K. Dick?



44. What is the name of the dome-shaped muscular partition that separates the abdominal and thoracic cavities?



45. Tocophobia is the fear of what?



46. The capitulation of Marshal Bazaine's force at Metz was the last critical action of which war?



47. Ash Wednesday is so-called because ashes were sprinkled over the heads of penitents. From what were the ashes produced?



48. Which poem in five sections, first published in 1922, was described by the poet as "....just a piece of rhythmical grumbling"?



49. Two telephone numbers can be dialled to reach the emergency services; one is 999, what is the other?



50. Which river, 120 miles long , rises on the northern slopes of Ben Lui, with headwaters called the Fillan and the Dochart?



51. Which letter of the alphabet is used as a symbol in chemistry for the quantity of heat entering a system, and in physics as a symbol for electrical charge?



52. Who was rewarded with a gift of an emerald tie clip from "a gracious lady at Windsor" for his part in the recovery of the Bruce Partington Plans?



53. What were reduced by 75% under the terms of the Young Plan of 1929-30, sometimes described as "too little, too late"?



54. Later a teacher at the Bauhaus, which Russian-born artist is generally credited with producing the first purely abstract paintings; his "Kirche in Murnau" being displayed as early as 1910?



55. Where is the Mohorovicic discontinuity?



56. What is the full name of the disgraced 'Big Brother' contestant forced to leave the house for overtly plotting against the other residents?



57. Which act of 1673 directed that all holders of military or civil offices had to be communicants of the Anglican Church?



58. What is the name of the one-legged sports commentator who is the cousin of former wrestler Jackie Pallo?



59. What was the name of the spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's classic science-fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey"?



60. In which year did the London Evening News merge into the Evening Standard?



61. Which city on the river Tagus, once the capital of Castile, and later of Spain, is the capital of the Castile-La-Mancha region?



62. Which British choreographer choreographed the ballet created from Mahler's "Song of the Earth"?



63. What was the 'Asahi Shimbun' first produced 24 September 1980 and advertised as 'untouched by human hands'?



64. What historically were hatpieces, leopards, cartwheels, and unicorns?



65. To which poet was Palgrave's Golden Treasury dedicated?



66. What is the name of the Japanese port that was devastated by a huge earthquake in 1995, resulting in 4000 deaths?



67. Who was the last monarch to use Hampton Court as an official residence?



68. Complete this observation on communications with The Almighty made by Thomas Szazz in 1974 "If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a ..."



69. Who in a speech of 1381 said "If God had wanted to create slaves, he would surely have decided at the beginning of the world who was to be slave and who master"?



70. Which economist died at Gatcombe Park, now the home of the Princess Royal, on 11th September 1823?



71. Whose 1852 play La Dame aux Camélias was a dramatisation of his own novel and the basis for the Verdi opera La Traviata?



72. Which middle-eastern country derives its name from the Hebrew for white, a probable reference to the snow-capped peaks of the country?



73. Highlighting the difficulties of interpretation in quantum mechanics, who was the Austrian physicist who devised a "thought experiment" involving a box containing a radioactive source, a bottle of poison and a live cat?



74. The first tied cricket Test Match was in 1960 but in which year was there a tied Test between Australia and India?



75. For which queen was Inigo Jones's Queen's House at Greenwich commissioned?



76. Which Scottish Football League club play home games at Tannadice Park?



77. Which great jazz musician composed the Shakespearean suite "Such Sweet Thunder"; a musical study of Hamlet, "Madness in Great Ones" and an incidental score for the rarely-produced "Timon of Athens"?



78. Who was the middle distance runner who became the first BBC Television Sports Personality of the Year in 1954?



79. Spoken by Touchstone in Act 3 of "As You Like It", the phrase "...it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." is believed by many scholars to be a reference to whose death?



80. Which river of West Africa rises in the Fouta Djallan Highlands only 150 miles from the Atlantic, but runs in a gigantic arc over 4000 kilometres in length before flowing into the Atlantic?



81. In which constellation is the Crab Nebula?



82. Native to the Mediterranean and violet in colour, what sort of marine creature is a Venus's girdle?



83. Whose 1923 essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" attacked the literary realism of Arnold Bennett?



84. In which year did actor Sid James die?



85. In which colour jerseys do the Australian rugby union team play?



86. Who was the daughter of Echidna, who was metamorphosed by Circe into a hideous creature with twelve feet and six heads, each with three rows of teeth? Below her waist her body was made up of ferocious dog-like creatures which barked constantly. (nb I will not accept the mother-in-law as an answer)



87. In March 2000 a plaque was unveiled at Southport College of Art. It commemorated the contribution of three former students who collaborated in the founding of a comic in the town 50 years earlier. Which comic?



88. Which system of historical classification was devised by the 19th century Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen?



89. In which century did the so-called Highland Clearances take place?



90. Which popular card game of the 19th century, and still played today, had a predecessor called Spade the Gardener?



91. In which year was the Breathalyzer introduced?



92. The RMT was formed in 1990 by the merger of the National Union of Railwaymen and which other Union?



93. Hart's Rules are the standard set of conventions used in which profession?



94. Which surgeon at St George's Hospital in London gave his name to the standard text on human anatomy?



95. Which geological period followed the Devonian period but preceded the Ordovician?



96. R.V.Shepherd and H.J.Turpin invented which light sub-machine gun?



97. Which rule in table tennis was brought in to facilitate the progress towards the end of a game to prevent a never-ending series of deuces?



98. Which coloured jacket is worn by a greyhound out of trap 2?



99. Which act has had 14 number one hit records to rank third behind The Beatles and Elvis Presley in the all-time list in the British charts?



100. What is the cubed root of 59,319?