King William's College GKP 2013

[vontsira]

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t find any answers to the edition of the quiz (“2013 – 2014”) featured in this thread…

[Baron_Greenback]

@Ximenean

(I only know this because I caved in and read some of the answers on the internet. And I must say that I’m glad I didn’t waste any more time on section 5, because I wouldn’t have got it in a million years. The theme is rather obscure, and I still don’t understand all of the answers.)

I caved too, and you’re right that section 5 is impossibly difficult. I suppose the school being on the Isle of Man makes it slightly more feasible for the poor kids, but still

[Ximenean]

@Baron_Greenback

I caved too, and you’re right that section 5 is impossibly difficult. I suppose the school being on the Isle of Man makes it slightly more feasible for the poor kids, but still

Ah, I didn’t realise that the school was located there.
vontsira, I just Googled the text of some of the questions.

[Chronos]

So what’s at stake here, for the King William’s students?

[SCAdian]

@vontsira

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t find any answers to the edition of the quiz (“2013 – 2014”) featured in this thread…

Enter some of the questions on Google, and you’ll find other groups who work on the test and post their results. The Grauniad will post the official answers sometime after 1 Jan. (The 2012 answers were posted 23 Jan 13.)

[SCAdian]

@Chronos

So what’s at stake here, for the King William’s students?

Says Wiki:

Since 1904, the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper (GKP). The pupils sit the test twice; once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year, after having spent the holiday researching the answers. However, the test is now voluntary. It is well-known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are 40 to 50 for the unseen test and about 270 out of 360 for the second sitting. Traditionally, the best scorers were given a half day free from school, while anyone doing particularly badly was given a detention.

<snip>

Today the GKP is sent home to parents, there being a prize of £100 for the winning family. There is great competition between the local Manx families over this competition.

[Isilder]

For example, Love in a mist is a common name for a plant called Nigella, so love in a mist had her credit cards abused.

[Isilder]

Mendela died with excellent teeth, apparently big cats do too.
Tony Abbot is now PM of Australia, “the Lodge” being more of a Number 10 Downing Street than a White House.

[vontsira]

@Ximenean

vontsira, I just Googled the text of some of the questions.

@SCAdian

Enter some of the questions on Google, and you’ll find other groups who work on the test and post their results. The Grauniad will post the official answers sometime after 1 Jan. (The 2012 answers were posted 23 Jan 13.)

Thanks. I’ll try – or wait till the paper officially publishes the answers !

[vontsira]

@Isilder

Mendela died with excellent teeth, apparently big cats do too.

Now I reckoned that that one, referred to Tom Clancy’s death a couple of months ago – one of his novels is called “The Teeth of the Tiger”. Respectfully – might the Clancy answer in fact be correct? The Mandela one strikes me as pretty wildly abstruse, even for this mob.

Highly-intellectual and fastidious types sometimes turn out to harbour the odd incongruous – and endearing – enthusiasm for something lowbrow and trashy. I can imagine one of the KWC masters being a Clancy fan…

[SCAdian]

General consensus online seems to be that the teeth question refers to someone named Gillian Kean, who was the main trustee of The Dandelion Trust. (Dandelion = lion’s tooth.)
The categories:

1. Events of 1913
2. Italian painters
3. Poems by Yeats
4. places in Surrey
5. Isle of Man Railway locomotives
6. Places in Spain
7. Diarists
8. Bradshaw’s
9. English racecourses
10. London streets in literature
11. Royal babies
12. Latin phrases
13. Assassination attempts
14. Constables
15. Mineral water
16. “Rex”
17. People from India
18. Events of 2013

[vontsira]

@SCAdian

General consensus online seems to be that the teeth question refers to someone named Gillian Kean, who was the main trustee of The Dandelion Trust. (Dandelion = lion’s tooth.)
The categories:

1. Events of 1913
2. Italian painters
3. Poems by Yeats
4. places in Surrey
   5. Isle of Man Railway locomotives
5. Places in Spain
6. Diarists
7. Bradshaw’s
8. English racecourses
9. London streets in literature
10. Royal babies
11. Latin phrases
12. Assassination attempts
13. Constables
14. Mineral water
15. “Rex”
16. People from India
17. Events of 2013

Dear Lord – I hereby renounce, for ever after, the King William’s College quiz – batshit crazy, isn’t in it. I’m a railway enthusiast, and love the Isle of Man Railway, and have visited the island to travel on it, several times; but section 5 could have been in the Manx language for all that it conveyed to me – and even knowing now what the section is about, I can understand and answer only one out of the ten questions in it. For the great majority of us, life is just too bloody short…