I am in the process of constructing a trivia quiz and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to seek Doper input.
I need suggestions for the questions I ask, but I want it to consist of a specific type of question. Each answer must be a factual number, and not something that is generally “known”. For the most part, I want guesses; some educated, some wild.
To give you an idea, here is a small sample of what I have so far:
How many performances of “Phantom of the Opera” have been performed on Broadway?
How many Taco Bells are there in Australia?
What year was “Rolling Stone” magazine first published?
What was the base price of a Ford Mustang when it debuted in 1964?
How many movies did John Wayne appear in?
This should give an idea of what I am looking for.
I’ve written trivia quizzes, and I’ve been in more trivia matches than I can begin to count (heh, numbers!)
I don’t know what audience you’re writing for, but the best way to alienate an audience is to come up with a bunch of questions no one can answer. Deliberately writing questions for which answers are not generally known may impress them at the Mensa Club monthly meeting, but it’s not something most people will appreciate at a bar trivia night.
If I were writing questions calling for numbers I would draw my questions from eighth-grade level science and history books; pop culture (how many trombones were mentioned in The Music Man, what was the year of the movie subtitled A Space Odyssey, etc.) or at least make the answer a +/- range where an ordinary person could make a reasonable guess.
The one exception would be sports. Sports fans often know exact scores, years played, individual and team stats, etc.
This is from the OP, so questions where the participants won’t actually “know” the answer directly seem to be preferred.
How many calories in a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
In seconds, what is the record for the fastest time to slice a cucumber?
How tall is the tallest living woman?
I think that’s not unlikely someone will know that (I do, for instance, from watching my weight years ago.) The Mt Everest one I’m sure somebody will have that memorized on the button. I get the feeling the OP is going for less trivia and more an estimation game, like that old interview nugget: “How many piano tuners are there in New York?”
Nobody is going to get frustrated. It’s a fun, loose exercise with friends and family.
Give a think and a guess to things you’ve perhaps never thought much about. How many dimples in a golf ball? How many elevators are in the Empire State Building?
Closest to the actual number gets points. Most points wins.
Using the diameter of the Earth’s orbit as a baseline, how far out can you measure the distance to a star directly, i.e., via triangulation?
The answer is 300 light-years. You then use what you learn about stars within that interval to measure the distance to others according their physical characteristics, e.g., luminosity.
Okay, if approximations are the goal and not exact answers, I won’t be so snippy. Here are a few ideas.
How many stitches in a Major League baseball (108)
How many steps in the Washington Monument (896, but the staircase has been closed since 1976)
How long is a light year - hint, it’s distance, not time (5.876 trillion miles or 9.476 trillion kilometers)
Which isotope of uranium was used in the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima (U-235)
According to the musical “Rent” how many minutes are in a year (525,600)
What year did the Curies discover radium (1898)
Walt Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards won by an individual. How many? (22, excluding four honorary awards)
You have a cannon that is perfectly level, with its bore parallel to the ground. If you fire one round and simultaneously drop another from the height of the bore, which one will hit the ground first?
They’ll hit the ground at exactly the same moment, since gravity affects them equally.