—Since I watch “Jeopardy!” every day in the office, and am known for calling out the right answers pretty quickly, my coworkers goaded me into taking the Online Test to be a contestant. I took the Wednesday night quiz, if you want to give it a try yourself, there’s one more on Thursday at 11PM ET/8 PM PT, but you have to register earlier.
Anyway, I think I scored 36 out of 50, which is just 1 question above the minimum for a “pass”. So we’ll have to see if I get a call in the next few months from the Contestant Coordinator.
Here are the questions I had, they’ll change before the next test, though, so no cheating!:
1)MONTHS OF THE YEAR
Each year, it’s Black History Month
2)RECENT MOVIES
“Slumdog Millionaire” is set in this city
3)ROYALTY
This British queen outlived her husband by 39 years.
4)LITERARY GENRES
An epistolary novel is written in the form of these.
5)DRAMA
This group played a major role in early Greek comedy but later only appeared between acts.
6)BIG BUSINESS
Murex, Conch, and Clam were names of early tankers owned by this company.
7)FAMILIAR PHRASES
A farewell performance is this bird’s “song”.
8)ANIMALS IN LITERATURE
The villains in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” are this type of animal.
9)SIMPLE SCIENCE
It’s the type of electrical current that only travels one way.
10)GOLF LINGO
It’s the term for shooting a 3 on a par-5 hole.
11)U.S. STATES
It’s the third-largest state in the U.S. in area.
12)MILITARY HISTORY
This ship sunk December 7th, 1941 was designated a National Landmark in 1989.
13)BACK TO BACH
A group of 6 chamberworks from 1721 is known as these concertos.
14)PATRIOTIC SONGS
“The Fruited Plain” appears in this 1893 song.
15)CELEBRITIES
In 2008 this young actress confirmed her couplehood with Samantha Ronson.
16)VOCABULARY
It’s a lady’s dressing table, or a synonym for conceit.
17)ASTRONOMERS
Ptolemy’s model was accepted for over 1000 years, until this Polish thinker came along in the 1500’s.
18)RELIGIOUS LEADERS
He served as the Archbishop of Krakow in the 1960’s.
19)AMERICAN NOVELS
This Upton Sinclair book was instrumental in the passage of the Pure Food & Drug Act
20)THE ART WORLD
He died in 1890 having sold 1 painting; in 1990 his Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million
21)BODIES OF WATER
Over a mile deep and 25 million years old, it’s the deepest and oldest lake on earth.
22)THE INTERNET
The Mozilla Foundation released this open-source web browser in 2004.
23)BESTSELLERS
Completes the title of Elizabeth Gilbert’s tale of a 3-country journey, “Eat, Pray …”
24)THE 20TH CENTURY
Country in whose civil war the International Brigades fought in the 1930’s.
25)’B’ IN GEOLOGY
Formed from cooling lava, it’s the most abundant volcanic rock.
26)ARCHITECTURE
Many Gothic cathedrals used an arched support called a “flying” this.
27)COLLEGE LATIN
3-word Latin phrase for the highest honors granted on graduation.
28)AMERICAN POEMS
Plural title of Joyce Kilmer’s work that admits, “Poems are made by fools like me.”
29)TV THEMES
It’s “where everybody knows your name”.
30)THE METRIC SYSTEM
1 inch equals 2.54 of these.
31)THE GRAMMYS
The 2007 classical crossover Grammy went to “Love Supreme: the Legacy of” this 1960’s Jazz sax man.
32)BRITISH AUTHORS
His “Tom Jones” is one of the first great British novels.
33)19th C. PRESIDENTS
In 1823 he declared the America’s off-limits for European colonization.
34)HISPANIC AMERICANS
This governor of New Mexico ran for president in 2008.
35)U.S. CITIES
It forms a Metropolitan Statistical Area along with Cambridge & Quincy.
36)SHORT STORIES
Nick Adams is the protagonist in many of the short stories in this author’s “In Our Time”.
37)THE ELEMENTS
This element makes up about 78% of normal dry air by volume.
38)STATE BIRDS
The male of this state bird of Maryland is black, white & orange.
39)PLACES IN THE BIBLE
In Exodus 19 “The Lord descended upon” this mount “in fire”.
40)STARTS & ENDS WITH ‘T’
Object in which you’d brew your oolong.
41)WORLD LEADERS
This Venezuelan president likes to call his country a Bolivarian Republic.
42)20TH CENTURY LIT
T.S. Eliot’s verse drama “Murder in the Cathedral” deals with the death of this man.
43)LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY
This general, who took the Alamo, was made President of Mexico 11 times between 1833 and 1855.
44)WALL STREET WOES
This investment bank, swallowed up in 2008, had an appropriately non-bullish word in its name.
45)BUZZWORDS
This “bump” made Time Magazine’s top 10 buzzwords of 2008.
46)PHYSICS
Term first used by James Watt for a unit equivalent to 550 foot-pounds of work per second.
47)STATES OF THE UNION
It’s “The Yellowhammer State”.
48)POETS
“The Tyger” is a famous lyric by this author-illustrator.
49)HANDICRAFTS
“Knit one” is commonly followed by this action “two”.
50)THE MUSIC SCENE
This British band released “In Rainbows” as a name-your-own-price digital download.
And here are the answers:
1) Februray 2) Mumbai 3) Victoria 4) Letters 5) Chorus 6) Shell 7) Swan 8) Snakes (I didn’t know this one) 9) Direct Current 10) Eagle 11) California (of course!) 12) USS Arizona 13) Brandeburg (missed this one) 14) America the Beautiful 15) Lindsay Lohan 16) Vanity 17) Copernicus 18) Pope John Paul II 19) The Jungle 20) Van Gogh 21) Baikal (whoops!) 22) Firefox 23) Love (never heard of it) 24) Spain 25) Basalt 26) buttress 27) Summa Cum Laude (another whoops—I put Magna) 28) Trees (another one I never heard of) 29) Cheers 30) Centimeter 31) Coltrane (spaced on this one) 32) Fielding (another one I misssed—started to worry about passing after missing so many in the last few) 33) Monroe 34) Richardson 35) Boston 36) Hemmingway 37) Nitrogen 38) Oriole 39) Sinai (brain froze on this one) 40) Teapot 41) Chavez (blanked on this one too) 42) Becket (another miss) 43) Santa Anna 44) Bear Stearns (get it?) 45) Fist Bump 46) Horsepower (if I had another second I would have gotten this, but ‘joule’ popped in my head first and the timer was counting down fast) 47) Alabama (whiffed on this one) 48) Blake (just couldn’t pull this name off the tip of my tongue) 49) purl and 50) Radiohead
Luckily I caught “Slumdog Millionaire” just this weekend, and we happened to be shooting an episode where I needed to find stock footage of Bangalore and found a lot of stuff from Mumbai that it stuck in my head when I watched the movie. Also would have missed “basalt” if I didn’t notice the clue category was “’B’ in Geology”. Other than that, the ones I got right I knew immediately, it was the others that took time I ended up missing.
