Reputed to be the world’s most difficult quiz - ‘devised for intellectual torture’ (The Guardian).
Dr Pat Cullen has set the King William’s College General Knowledge Papers since 1997.
Arguably the most difficult set of questions in the world. Devised for intellectual torture. While writing my 2005 book Brainiac, I spent a very enjoyable year playing historical detective, combing through dusty books and fuzzy microfilmed broadsheets in a series of enormous libraries. I wanted to find the ur-quiz: the birth of the general-knowledge question-and-answer game that would become "trivia." I had read that newspapers ran quiz columns during the 1920s crossword craze, but was never able to unearth an example in the hundreds of U.S. puzzle columns I looked at. In the end, I decided that quizzes weren't born until the crossword puzzle fad cross-pollinated with the spread of intelligence testing, and that Ralph Albertson's quiz in his 1925 Mental Agility Book was the closest thing to a "first trivia quiz." But I overlooked one other possible ancestor of trivia: the classroom quiz. This month, the University of Chicago Press introduces Americans to a new corner of quiz culture: the King William's College "General Knowledge Papers," given every year for over a century at a small but prestigious boarding school on the Isle of Man. Students take the quiz in strict exam conditions on the last day of every autumn term, and then spend their Christmas breaks researching answers and circulating the quiz among friends and family. Prizes are given for the top "open book" and "closed book" scores. The Guardian newspaper caught wind of the quiz in the 1950s and began printing it every Christmas, where its outlandishly difficult questions have found a large and loyal audience. The new Liverpool University Press volume (distributed here by the University of Chicago Press) contains thirty years of the "World's Most Difficult Quiz" (yes, with answers) and adds a new "bespoke" quiz never before published. Only the British demand "bespoke" trivia questions to go with their custom-fitted spats and monocles. American quiz fans will find the book endlessly fascinating, I'm sure, but be warned: this isn't like any trivia you've ever seen before. The earliest "General Knowledge Papers" were a series of simple fact-response questions like "Who wrote Pickwick?" But a difficulty arms race over the decades has turned the quiz into something else entirely: not just questions that are obscure, but ones that are (especially for an American) completely impenetrable. Much as British crosswords ramp up the difficulty not by using obscure words but by cloaking the clues in a veil of intentionally cryptic humor and wordplay, so these quizzes are equal part factual question and riddle. They aren't so much about recalling the facts as they are about just understanding the damn questions. Take the title of this post, a question I borrowed at random from the 2004 quiz: "Wombling free, what destination is partly algebraic?" "Wombling free" is a reference to the British children's TV classic The Wombles, about a band of strange litter-collecting creatures that burrow deep beneath London. Their theme song began "Underground, overground, wombling free," which, combined with the word "destination," is supposed to cue us that the question is looking for a tube station on the London Underground. The answer: Totteridge and Whetstone, in north London. Why is Totteridge and Whetstone "partially algebraic"? Because "Totteridge" has nothing to do with algebra, but The Whetstone of Witte is an important early algebra text published by Robert Recorde in 1557. See? Perfectly simple. All the quiz questions are organized into ten-question series. This question came from a set of ten "wombling free" questions that each points cryptically to a different London tube station, usually by punning on their names. The stop that "suggests olive trees in Tuscany" is Arnos Grove, on the Piccadilly line. The stop that implies "inept play at whist" is Whitechapel, since "Whitechapel play" is archaic slang for lousy whist. The stop "originally worth 6/8" is Angel, a reference to a 15th-century gold coin. But you probably knew that. The unifying themes are often the only thing making the quizzes even possible: without them, the questions themselves don't seem to point to anything at all. Take a 2009 question like "Who is better than best?" It's unanswerable-unless you start trying to solve it tandem with its nine companions. "What stepped out from BA?" "What is also a hummingbird?" "Who retained his virtuosity despite an accidental conversion to syndactyly?" If you know that syndactyly is the condition of having the fingers grow together, you may remember that one "virtuoso" so afflicted was jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who had two fingers fused together in a house fire when he was 18. (Who am I kidding? You almost certainly don't know either of those facts. I didn't. But it's a fun afternoon of Googling, anyway.) Convinced that you are on the right track, you may now notice that "stepping out" from BA might be hinting at a dance from Buenos Aires-the tango maybe? Aha, tango/Django. And there's a kind of hummingbird called the Jamaican mango. Other clues, you start to see, seem to point obliquely to Santo Domingo and Chicken Marengo. Then who or what is better than best? Why, "Ringo," of course-better than (Pete) Best. The pleasure is more akin to cracking a code than it is to remembering an answer. To American trivia fans, accustomed to a cleaner-cut kind of recall, this may all seem frustrating and silly, or it may sound like a lot of fun. As for me, well-can't it be both? The King William's College quiz was born, amazingly, in 1905, so my book on the origins of quizzing was dead wrong. Here's a quiz tradition that began decades before general-knowledge quizzing became an American hobby. I wonder if there are other educational forebears to modern trivia that never lucked into a mass audience outside the ivy halls of academe, as this one did. If anyone knows of any, feel free to womble over and let me know. Until then, I'll be puzzling over questions like "Whose is the point of a worm-like addition?" and "During the year 1900, whose return for 1st June was 31.1 - 14- 48 -17?" and "Where does the brewer recognise a recurved bill?" If I find out, I'll let you know. For those who like the challenge of questions such as, "What is a megalaima haemacephala?", The World's Most Difficult Quiz, containing 30 years' worth of tests, is now available in book form for the first time in its 100-year history. The notoriously difficult quiz began life in 1905 at King Williams College, a private boys' boarding school on the Isle of Man. Initially, the test was mandatory; teachers thought up questions and schoolboys as young as 12 struggled for hours to produce the correct answers. Eventually, the test became voluntary and the task of setting questions fell to an appointed quizmaster. The current quizmaster is Dr. Pat Cullen, a retired GP and former student at King Williams College. He entered the college in 1947, and says in a phone interview, "I was probably perceived as tolerably intelligent." Nevertheless, the test was "jolly difficult" in his estimation. "You sat for three hours with this wretched paper in front of you, and you tried to work out what on Earth he was getting at. A lot of us would say, 'Right, Mr. Thompson, who sets the paper, is particularly fond of Queen Elizabeth I, Alice in Wonderland and the Dutch town of Delft.' If it looked remotely suitable, you'd [answer] Queen Elizabeth I or the Mad Hatter. The clever lads would get 25 questions right out of 180." In Cullen's era, after taking the test once, boys were sent home with the questions to research over the Christmas break. He remembers, "I would spend a lot of every Christmas holiday in the public library." Cullen's father helped out as well, making copies to send to friends. "He used to send it to my godfather, who was a very erudite chap who'd been to Oxford, and to a chap who was a commissioner at Scotland Yard who was very good at coughing up answers." When the boys returned in the New Year, they re-sat the exam. "The first night back, it was a big exchange and swapping of answers," recalls Cullen. "People who hadn't done any work would be sidling around behind the enthusiasts, trying to look over their shoulders. We had no Internet in those days. It was all down to reference books." Harry Galbraith, another former pupil, came from a poor family and did not excel academically but always performed well on the quiz. This seemed to confound the other top students. Two boys in particular, recalls Galbraith, "couldn't understand why someone who to them appeared to be obsessed with sporting matters could possibly, repeatedly, win this very difficult quiz." Galbraith puts it down to his "very strong-rooted competitive instinct. I didn't feel anything competitive about doing well in academic subjects but this was a straight competition. I think that's what made the difference." Like Cullen, he spent his Christmas holidays at the library, studying. "The pleasure was in detecting what the theme of a particular set of questions was," he says. "Once you detected a theme, you could often answer six or seven questions in that group of 10." For instance, "What is the yolk of an egg?" appeared on a quiz in the 1990s. The answer: vitelline. The next question was, "What is a clove hitch across shrouds?" Answer: ratline. The next question: "What results when nuts are cracked in brown sugar?" Answer: praline. The pattern emerging is that all the answers end in "line." This helps when guessing the answer to the next question, "What lady was imprisoned 13 times under the 'Cat and Mouse Act'?" Answer: Emmeline. Today, the Guardian newspaper in England publishes the King Williams College quiz in late December. Very quickly thereafter, groups of interested people gather online to pool their answers. "You key into one of these websites and you see the answers coming in," Cullen says. "Someone will say, 'Well, we know the quizmaster has a Danish wife, so it might have something to do with Denmark.' " Cullen is amused by this, and by comments like, "There's a few questions on birds because he's keen on birdwatching." But, he says, "Sometimes it's lovely if they really are barking up the wrong tree." It's that time of year again for Guardian readers: to have their ignorance in every conceivable area of human thought and endeavour cruelly exposed by the King William's College quiz. This has been tormenting me ever since I started reading the Guardian properly, when I was a teenager. In other words, the same age as the poor children obliged to take this fiendish test. "Who would take white eggs and soda?" "Explain: 1. Hull cheese. 2. Newgate knocker. 3. Glasgow magistrate." I may have experienced about as many of the trials and pains of adolescence as the next kid, but at least, I reflected at the time, I didn't have to go to King William's College on the Isle of Man and be compulsorily subjected to this infernal quiz. The Guardian might print it every Christmas, with a long delay before printing the answers, but at least readers didn't have to take it under exam conditions, and then retake it after the holidays having done god knows how much research. And then be given a detention if we didn't reach a certain standard. We learn from the introduction that this punishment has been dropped, and the test is now voluntary, due to pressures of official examinations, which is a very depressing reflection on government insistence on standardisation of aptitude. Because this is the ultimate challenge of general knowledge, and to solve it involves not only a command of classical, historical and literary knowledge, but popular culture and contemporary events too, and, crucially, a freakish capacity for lateral thinking. Eighteen sections of 10 questions each, all linked by a theme. For example, the first half of Section 16 from the 2006-07 quiz (answers at the end of the column): "Which manufacturer's product is: 1. waxed? 2. a whorl of petals? 3. a Brahmin genealogist? 4. a pendulant tropical climber? 5. surely of very limited horsepower?" When you see the answers, it will make you salute the setter's intelligence and resourcefulness, but there will also be something chilling about the sadism involved. I wonder whether years of staring uncomprehendingly at these nightmare questions has not rubbed off on me. The thing is, after this, every other quiz seems superficial and easy (even if you don't know the answers). It is the kind of quiz that still makes me fail to understand why I was lynched when I gave the quizzing regulars at a London pub the answer to the question "What links Nixon's visit to China, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, and the Manhattan Project?" But you need pinnacles like this in order to make you satisfied with rambles in the foothills. And you marvel at the kind of intellect that can confidently have a go at it. How the students managed pre-Google is barely imaginable, and even now the questions are as Google-proof as they can make them. As the quiz has been going since 1917 - the questions here cover the years 1981 to 2011 - you wonder if this was the kind of thing that helped produce the masterminds of Bletchley Park. (Incidentally, in case you were suspicious, this review is not part of a marketing conspiracy between LUP and the Guardian. I only found out about this book by seeing an ad in the LRB and then pestering the LUP's publicity office for a copy.) There is a specially composed set of questions at the end of the book for you to have a go at, with a prize, about which I will make no comment whatsoever, except to say that you might want to think twice before sending your answers in: it's GBP1,000-worth of LUP books. THE General Knowledge Paper has stumped pupils at King William's College for over a century. Upper-level students would sit for the test on the last school day before Christmas. Over the next month they would pore over reference books and retake the test in January. Times change. In 1999 it was deemed "inappropriate that pupils should be deflected from more meaningful revision during Christmas break," said Dr. Pat Cullen, the quizmaster and a retired physician, chatting from his home not far from the school on the Isle of Man. Currently, the so-called World's Most Difficult Quiz is voluntary. Low scorers no longer get detention, or high scorers a half day off. Only a handful of students take it now. But the quiz is a parlor game for readers of The Guardian, which has published questions - 18 sets, each on a theme that, too, must be cracked - at Christmas since 1951. "Adults beaver away at home over mince pies," Dr. Cullen said, until answers come out in January. Below are edited excerpts from the 2011-12 General Knowledge Paper. All 180 questions are at The Guardian Web site. 100 years ago, in 1911 ... 1. what disaster befell the Asch Building? 2. what was removed from the Salon Carre? 3. who stenciled the letters A, B, C, D, O & L? 4. where were the twin clocks started at George V's crowning moment? 5. who wrote of a multitalented peer and the warden's granddaughter? 6. who explained how the squaws caused pallor in the Jesuit preachers? 7. who shot to fame during a performance of "The Tale of Tsar Saltan"? 8. who took a pole position ahead of British opposition? 9. who silently portrayed Marguerite Gautier? 10. who agreed to receive GBP400 annually? Which tale or tales ... 1. is all about Hester's badge of shame? 2. investigates the murder of Robert Ablett? 3. describes Lamb's problems in the Banda Oriental? 4. relates the heroic story of the survivor from Charybdis? 5. describes the criminal activities of Alex, Dim, Georgie and Pete? 6. describes a prize fight between the gamekeeper and the coxswain at the Dripping Pan? 7. considers the murder of an expat philanderer in East Africa? 8. tells of how Dick and the outlaw dress up as friars? 9. are set in the moorlands above Tweedsmuir? 10. reveals the ghost of a don at All Saints'? Which patriot of which country ... 1. was eulogized by Blind Harry? 2. died at the hand of one who had started life as Ramachandra? 3. was declared innocent following a retrial 25 years after execution? 4. wrote about the execution of Gerhard III and was murdered by the Gestapo? 5. anticipated the Oxford martyrs Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley by 140 years and uttered in Latin "Holy Simplicity"? 6. founded a journal in London, which would have been translated as "Thought and Action"? 7. was the son of a general and senator, and shot the governor general and then himself? 8. was hanged publicly 28 months after the start of the January Uprising? 9. was defrocked and later executed following betrayal by Ignacio Elizondo? 10. was reburied 31 years after his secret execution? What ... 1. brings light? 2. is named for its inactivity? 3. has a malodorous tetroxide? 4. has a particularly frustrating resistance to corrosion? 5. Skargard settlement has shared its name with four rarities? 6. was named for the daughter of No. 4, but had an alternative name that was shed in 1949? 7. was alleged by some to be a pun on its discoverer's name? 8. sounds like some sort of hobgoblin? 9. was identified in Lochaber? 10. quite simply stinks? The quizmaster admits to a Euro-bias. Below, questions with an American slant from "The World's Most Difficult Quiz," an anthology just published by Liverpool University Press. Entitle afresh: 1. "Tomorrow Is Another Day" 2. "The Chronic Argonauts" 3. "Mag's Diversions" 4. "The Various Arms" 5. "The Tree and the Blossom" 6. "Before This Anger" 7. "Summer of the Shark" 8. "Something That Happened" 9. "The Incident at West Egg" 10. "The Sea Cook" Who was nicknamed ... 1. Muggsy? 2. Pee Wee? 3. Swee' Pea? 4. Cannonball? 5. Blind Lemon? 6. Tricky Sam? 7. Stalebread? 8. Yardbird? 9. Satchmo? 10. Wingy? Where, in Douglas, is ... 1. Ava? 2. Armour? 3. Superior? 4. Alexandria? 5. Castle Rock? 6. Douglasville? 7. Waterville? 8. Lawrence? 9. Roseburg? 10. Minden? Who married ... 1. his namesake? 2. Geneva? 3. in London? 4. in the Blue Room? 5. the same woman twice? 6. "The Inquiring Camera Girl"? 7. Pat, whose husband said "she also ran"? 8. a planter of Japanese cherry trees? 9. Lemonade Lucy? 10. not at all? Who ... 1. may have died of smallpox at Gravesend? 2. led the tribes at Little Bighorn? 3. received a medal from President Washington? 4. invented, over 12 years, the Cherokee alphabet? 5. greeted the Pilgrims landing at Cape Cod with "Welcome, Englishmen"? 6. deferred the execution of Miantonomo to his brother? 7. claimed to have cut out Custer's heart? 8. dictated his autobiography to S. M. Barrett? 9. besieged Detroit for five months? 10. slew Big Mouth? For answers, click here.
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