Steve Tribe - University Challenge: The Ultimate Questions: Over 3000 Brand-New Quiz Questions from the Hit BBC TV Show

First published in 2016 by Quadrille

Foreword by Peter Gwyn

Text University Challenge and ITV Ventures Limited 2016.

University Challenge is produced in association with The College Bowl Company.

Quadrille is an imprint of Hardie Grant www.hardiegrant.com.au

Quadrille Publishing

Pentagon House

5254 Southwark Street

London SE1 1UN

www.quadrille.co.uk

eISBN 9781849499330

The rights of University Challenge and ITV Studios Limited have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Publishing Director: Sarah Lavelle

Art Director: Helen Lewis

Designer and Editor: Steve Tribe

Cover Designer: Emily Lapworth

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Contents

Looking back at the earliest editions of University Challenge, broadcast in 1962 in rather grainy black and white, its tempting to wonder what the students of that era would have thought if theyd known that their children and grandchildren would be able to find the answer to almost any question, however difficult, by accessing Google Search on their mobile phones.

If the programme and its viewers agree on one thing, its perhaps that there really is such a thing as General Knowledge: a range of facts, dates, names, areas of awareness, cultural references and much, much more, all of which helps us to make sense of the world. Theres a shared belief that General Knowledge is a good thing to have, that having more of it is better than having less, that its fun to test how much weve got, and that young people who possess it in glorious abundance deserve to be celebrated. Furthermore, the best of them should be given a trophy, along with the right to call themselves University Challenge Series Champions. Underpinning all of this is the old-fashioned belief that true General Knowledge belongs in the brain, not in the list of results from an internet search.

Its not only an extraordinary range and depth of knowledge that our most accomplished students demonstrate, but also an ability to spot the direction in which a question is going, and the precise moment when they have heard sufficient information to be sure they have the correct answer. At times, this ability is quite eerie, as on the distant occasion when, having heard Bamber Gascoigne utter only the words On what colourful occasion, a contestant buzzed in with the correct answer of The Field of the Cloth of Gold, no doubt prompting millions of viewers to brush up on their sixteenth-century history.

Speechlessness is not a term one would readily associate with Jeremy Paxman, but he was once rendered close to it after asking the question: What day of the week will it be one hundred days after Monday? The programmes production team expected baffled faces all round, but one contestant promptly buzzed in with the correct answer: Wednesday. How on earth did you know that? asked Jeremy, after a stunned pause. Its easy, replied the contestant, if you know modular arithmetic. For weeks afterwards, Jeremy told me later, I had people stopping me in the street asking me how on earth he knew that. This perhaps just demonstrates that an easy question is one to which you happen to know the answer.

In the pages that follow, youll encounter thousands of questions taken from past editions of University Challenge, some rather hard, some perhaps a little less so, but never, we hope, too obscure; we do quite genuinely try and avoid those questions that very occasionally prompt Jeremy Paxman to say but why you should be expected to know that, I have no idea, before tossing the offending question-card over his shoulder.

We hope you enjoy them.

Executive Producer, University Challenge

If anyone says its a jolly day out, Id think they were lying. On a scale of one to ten of how competitive we were? About ten.

IAN HISLOP

(Editor, Private Eye)

Contestant, 2005

I was 27 when we did the auditions for the presenters role. And of course the students were only 21 or whatever, and at that age, at six years difference, I was the Old Man of the Hills I knew everything, and they were just undergraduates!

BAMBER GASCOIGNE

Presenter, 19621987

What letter and number denote the vitamin which is also the designated food colour E101? It imparts a yellow-orange colour to commercial vitamin supplements.

Three bonus questions on Quakers

a. Raised as a Quaker on the farm of his aunt, which Hollywood actor became the first to be nominated posthumously for an Academy Award as Best Actor after his death in 1955?

b. A statue to Joseph Pease, the railway pioneer who became the first Quaker MP, stands in which town of north-east England, where he was born in 1799?

c. Born into a Quaker family in Cumberland, which scientist published his atomic theory in the 1808 work A New System of Chemical Philosophy?

Founded in 1961, the I.U.G.S. is a body devoted to international cooperation in which field of science?

Three bonus questions on quantum physics

a. Heisenbergs original uncertainty relation concerned which two observable properties of a particle?

b. Quantitatively, the product of the two uncertainties is always greater than or equal to the unreduced Planck constant, h, divided by what number?

c. A similar uncertainty relationship exists between energy and what quantity?

What two-digit number links the first part of the small intestine, the number of cranial nerves, and the atomic number of magnesium?

Three bonus questions on pairs of names. In each case, the surname of the first person described is the given name of the second, for example Jane Austen and Austen Chamberlain. Your answer must include the given name and surname of both people described.

a. The eighteenth-century inventor of the marine chronometer now known as H4, and the actor whose film roles include John Book in Witness and Rick Deckard in Blade Runner?

b. The author of The World According to Garp, and the composer of White Christmas?

c. The broadcaster and author whose works include Cultural Amnesia, and the navigator who landed at Botany Bay in 1770?

Founded in 1971 by Michael Stern Hart, which internet project provides free online access to thousands of e-books, and is named after a German pioneer of printing who died in 1468?

Three bonus questions on films of the 1940s. In each case, name the film in which the following lines are spoken.

a. Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to. Dont you see? Its not just Kris thats on trial, its everything he stands for. Its kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles.

b. We always were English, and we always will be English; and its just because we are English that were sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!

c. I dont think any word can explain a mans life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece.

The figure of which ancient Greek god appears in the wedding procession of Theseus and Hippolyta in