2018 KQA MegaWhats Semi Finals 2

MEGAWHATS 2018
SEMI-FINALS 2
Research By
Mitesh Agarwal, Vivek Karthikeyan and Venkatesh Srinivasan

1. BMQJ – Bengaluru
2. CIDs from Kerala – Bengaluru
3. Matunga Manram – Mumbai
4. Memory Blank – Chennai
5. QED – Chennai
6. Swami and Friends – Hyderabad
7. Tequila Mockingbirds – Thrissur
8. Zulfiqar-e-Ingit – Mumbai

Saturday, June 30
Arts Quiz for teams of four or less – 1000 Hrs – CIDs from Kerala
Movies Open Quiz for teams of four or less – 1500 Hrs – Anustup, Thejaswi, Varun
Sunday, July 01
GS Hiranyappa Memorial Hist.-Geog. Open Quiz
for teams of four or less – 0930 Hrs – Ashwin, Nagaratna, Rajagopal
Sesame General Open Quiz for teams of four or less – 1430 Hrs – Arul, Appu,
Santosh

▪ 16 questions each clock-wise and anti-clockwise
▪ 12 questions written
All Clock/Anti-clock questions are for +10 on direct/pass and
+10/-5 on Infinite Pounce
All Written questions are for +6; no stakes, maximisers etc.

▪ 8 questions
▪ Infinite Bounce-Pounce
▪ +10, no negatives
▪ +10/-5 on Pounce
▪ Length of blanks MAY NOT be indicative of the number of letters in
the answer

MegaWhats 2018 Karnataka Quiz Association
Xavier: stands at the entrance to the trim line, lifting cars
down to the floor from an electrified rail.
Iceman, Wolverine, and Beast: engage in heavy lifting.
Storm and Colossus: can be found at the end of the chassis
line.
Vulcan and Havok: work as a team to lift cars back onto the
rail.
Who/What are these and where will you find them?
1

Robots in Tesla’s car factory
named after X-Men characters

Apart from the most famous one, then there are possibly only two
other sources – one is the Droeshout engraving, where everything
about it is flawed – one eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is
curiously mis-positioned. The hair is longer on one side of the
subject’s head, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body.
Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened
— and not like the gallant and confident figures he is known for.
The other work is an effigy made by Gheerart Janssen which
unfortunately has been repainted accidentally several times.
What are we talking about? Where will you specifically find the
Droeshout engraving?
2

William Shakespeare
The Droeshout Engraving is found in the famous First Folio
The most famous is the Chandos portrait

Who is the chap in the pic?
What is the connection between him and the two books?
3

Mercator wished to call his book on the cosmos an “Atlas” after
King Atlas, a mythical ruler who is said have invented the celestial
globe.
Mercator died before he completed the work. His son then added a
few maps before publishing it — this is how the usage of the word
Atlas to refer to a map collection came about. It was not Mercator’s
original intention.

This movie, Baishey Srabon, is the second film of the director.
The title of the work refers to a date that has special
significance for Bengalis, and marked the end of an era so to
say.
(Mild spoiler alert) The film is about a serial killer, who leaves
a clue at each murder location. The last death in the film ties
in with the film’s title and theme.
Who is the director? What is the significance of the title?
What are the clues?
4

Srijit Mukherji
The day Rabindranath Tagore died
Works of poetry by famous Bengali authors

It is a corruption of a Hindi word that in turn derives from Arabic. Its root
lies in an Arabic word meaning “pasture” and it came into Hindi to mean
“peasants”. Used to refer to a particular section of people, the corrupted
English version is often seen in national dailies in news stories that speak
about drought, agriculture crises and loan waivers.
The system under which they function has been around for a long time.
Under the Mughals, these people were of two types: khudkhasta and
pahikhasta.
What is the English word that must not be mistaken for violence?
What was the difference between the two types?
5

Ryot
From Raiyat
Khudkhastas were permanent labourers; Pahikhastas were
nomadic and moved places with every crop season.

More than 20% of female students in the US experience sexual assault
during the course of their college careers. Jess Ladd was one who went
through a torrid time. She later wanted to empower other survivors.
Wanting to come up with something that would have helped her at the
time, she made a platform through which victims are able to report assault
confidentially. The platform is named after a character who experienced
trauma, and today, she can be found roaming around the very man who
caused her anguish.
What is the platform called?
What’s the reference to her seducer?
6

Callisto
The fourth Galilean moon of Jupiter is called Callisto.

This is George Arliss playing a role that won him the best-actor Oscar
in 1930. Key to the plot of the movie is a purchase that if realized,
would “complete” the British Indian Empire. Parliament opposes the
plan, and the Bank of England is against it too. The protagonist then
scrambles to find alternate funding before the Russians, who are also
interested in it, beat the Brits to it.
Who is Arliss playing?
What does the man want to buy, also shown in the lampoon?
7

Disraeli
Suez Canal

‘____________, the Hotbed of Espionage,’ : this was the front-page
headline of the Free Press Journal on March 13, 1968. The headline
was accompanied by an interview with the Communist leader
K. Anirudhan, who complained in the Lok Sabha that the CIA had
made this quaint town their Indian headquarters for espionage.
Anirudhan had also expressed outrage at the luxurious quarters
made for a particular group of visitors, and claimed that a palace had
been constructed for them.
Which town was being spoken about?
Who were the group of visitors?
8

Rishikesh
The Beatles visiting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Ashram

▪ Three questions carrying six points each; three/part, if applicable
▪ All answers are one word/phrase/name
▪ Surnames will suffice, unless specified

Called the most photographed and filmed of its kind, Sierra #3 was built
in 1891 by the Rogers company for P&AC company. After P&AC went
bankrupt and its founder relocated to California, Sierra’s claim to fame
started – beginning with The Terror in 1920.
Over the years, it has featured in High Noon, Pale Rider, Unforgiven and
several others. In 2007, leading a fund-raise appeal for restoring it, this
person called it, “a treasured old friend”.
Sierra#3 now resides at a museum and is owned by the State of
California.
What was the Sierra#3? Who led the fund-raise appeal?
1

Identify the painter, and the subject.
2

This family of seven brothers and six sisters survived two wars, emigrated
to the US, and spent a lifetime experimenting with product designs. They
invented the first enclosed cabin monoplane. In the 1920s their skills in
hydraulics and thermodynamics led them from the field of aviation to
agriculture. They made notable advancements in the pump industry.
One of their pumps found another use. A family member was afflicted with
juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. His dad took an agri-pump and remade it
into a portable model named J-300 while researching into treatments.
Which family that has over 250 patents?
3

Locomotive
Clint Eastwood

Jack Russell
Dominic Cork

Jacuzzi

In the years after Japan was opened to international trade in the early
1850s, there was a clamour in Europe for all things Japanese. At that
time, while other things from Japan were better-known and prized,
Japanese woodblock prints were not. That period, when it was also
popularised by painters like Monet and Van Gogh who were being
influenced by them, would come later.
If they were not valued, how /for what purpose
did the prints first make their way into the Continent?
9

As wrapping material for textiles and ceramics to
prevent them from breaking in transit

If one explores the countryside
around the south of England in
the areas of Oxford, Dover,
Farnham and so on, one will come
across isolated churches such as
this one. It sometimes takes a
walk down three sides of a square
through the wood to reach one.
All of these are from the 17th
century and earlier.
For what reason did these
places of worship end up being
in the middle of nowhere?
10

Villages were burnt down following the great plague or
the black death, but their parish church remained.

It was meant to be the climactic finale to that evening’s top-rated
Panorama programme, but something appeared to have gone terribly
wrong. The man on screen was trying to revive a woman, Dipty Dey, but
she did not respond. As he shook his head and covered her face with a
black cloth, presenter Richard Dimbleby stepped in front of the camera
and announced the programme was over.
A few minutes later switchboards all across UK suddenly lit up with calls
from hundreds of people convinced they had just witnessed a gruesome
murder live on their television screens.
What happened that April day in 1956?
11

It was PC Sorcar’s first foray into television

We became familiar with the Pashtun word for tribe many years ago
through a Lahore-born Oxford-educated reverse-swinging Hall of
Famer. The word became known to us again through a man who took
the helm in 2001. It was all over the news again in 2013 when
someone was feted, and then most recently when a bunch of athletes
took the field in wet Bangalore.
What is the good word?
Who is the first person referred to?
(in his case it is a modified version of the word)
12

“zai” means tribe
Imran Khan Niazi
Hamid Karzai, Malala Yousufzai, Asghar Stanikzai, …

Named after the legendary ____________ Club in England where the
Rolling Stones played their first gig, this magazine was started on the
campus of Swarthmore College. The club itself derives its name from
a type of freshwater lobster.
Its first issue had the following first words:
You are looking at the first issue of a magazine of rock and roll
criticism. ____________ will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the
specialty of this magazine is intelligent writing about pop music....
—Issue No. 1, February 7, 1966
Which magazine?
13

Crawdaddy

When this person started making warped, multi-perspective designs, her staff
would have a tough time modelling them. Traditionally, plans are drawn by hand
and with drafting tools, using common geometric shapes—circles, triangles,
rectangles, squares. And here was someone asking them to distort these shapes.
Computer software back then was primitive, but they found an innovative way to
render the shapes using something else that was available in many offices back
then, putting it to innovative use. Positioning the drawings cleverly they would
instruct it to squeeze or stretch them. The inventor had used static electricity
created with a handkerchief, light and dry powder to invent this in 1938.
Who was the person?
What was the technology?
14

Zaha Hadid
A photocopier
They would place their regular drawings diagonally and when
they used the sizing tool, the machine warped the lines.

Located in the Ural mountains, Izhevsk is a city that has a major firearms
factory. The Izhvesk Mechanical Plant started as a firearms manufacturer; it
makes a lot of civilian products as well.
Their hunting shotguns were marketed under a brand-name that’s a
familiar geographical feature. Since 2013, they’ve been part of a merged
concern that is today the largest arms company in Russia.
In the post-war era, the plant created a set of weapons that was
instrumental in a group of people seeing considerable success on the
global stage.
What is the shotgun range called? What is the merged company
called? What were these success stories they facilitated?
15

Baikal
Kalashnikov
Russian shooters winning at the Olympics and other
competitions

Similar to chutney music from T&T, this form of folk music came
about during social gatherings by Indian immigrants in a country.
The name of the genre can perhaps be deduced by the fact that the
performers are all _______ while performing. Involving three
instruments, its predominant influence is Bhojpuri folk music, apart
from North Indian music and some local flavour.
The genre has been exported, not surprisingly, to The Netherlands,
and to the US and Canada.
Which genre?
Which country?
16

Suriname
Baithak gana

Identify this actress, familiar to Indian movie fans.
Which CW TV show is this a grab from?
1

Considering the timelines when the Aphrodite of Milos
was brought to the Louvre and kept on display, the
protagonist of which other work of art was
modelled almost entirely on it?
2

The origin of this famous phrase is likely from an 1884, Old
Trafford game between Australia and the North of England.
A hundred with the bat and ten wickets from Lancastrian
Richard Barlow sealed victory for the North of England and as
he left the field the Aussie skipper stopped him. After
performing a particular action, the Australian said: “___ ____ __
___ ___ __ ___."
The phrase has now entered common usage and the object
involved can be seen in the Old Trafford museum.
Which phrase?
3

Amy Jackson
Supergirl

Liberty Leading the People
by Eugène Delacroix

Take my hat off to you

Three wicket-keepers have made more than 500 runs in a Test series.
One is Denis Lindsay of South Africa in 1966-67.
One of the remaining two accomplished this versus India in 2000/01.
The wicketkeeper in question went on captain his team.
The other is an Indian wicketkeeper who was the first, when he did
this versus England in 1963/64. The player in question had made his
Test debut three years prior, even before his Ranji debut.
Name both. Give full names please.
1

Andy Flower
Budhi Kundheran

Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar III (19th cent.) was a great patron of art and
learning. He came up with a fairly complex set of thirteen different types of
games.
These games manifested themselves in kreeda patras – some were made
of sandalwood and ivory, and etched in silver and gold, they featured
works inspired by the Vijayanagar style.
This was the Mysore version of something that had come into India three
centuries prior; the first reference of which comes from a work from
that era.
How do we better know the kreeda patras? Which work?
2

Mysore Ganjifa playing cards
Baburnama

A well-loved Indian brand uses the images of the following creatures on a
set of products it sells, each indicating a specific source:
- Giraffe
- African Elephant
- Lemur
- Llama
- Andean Condor
- Sloth
- Toucan
Which brand and for what product line?
For which specific variant is the Sloth used?
3

Amul single-origin dark chocolate
Colombia

This is the Cuban Bee
Hummingbird a.k.a
Penny Hummingbird.
It is the smallest and
lightest known living
bird ever recorded.
What gives it the
nickname “Penny”?
What gives it the
name “Bee”?
4

It weighs less than a Canadian or US penny and because of
that they are often referred to as "Penny Hummingbirds" or
"Penny Birds."
Because of their small size, these birds are often mistaken for
a honey bee, which lead to their common name.

The Old Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point has
posters commemorating all the famous faces from American history.
There is one that is completely bare, without any data, and not even a
name. It just says “Major General. Born 1740”. This aligns with the
sentiment shown by the citizens of Norwich, Conn., who removed
two headstones from the local cemetery in the late 1700s.
Why?
5

Benedict Arnold
For his treason during the revolutionary war

Identify this 11th century temple found in a state capital city in
India. The temple is believed to be built by the kings from the
Somavamsi dynasty, with later additions from the Ganga rulers. The
deity was originally worshipped under a mango tree, giving this city
the moniker of Ekamra Kshetra.
While non-Hindus are not allowed into the temple, there is a raised
viewing platform outside the boundary wall that was built in the early
20th century at someone’s specific request.
At whose behest was the platform built?
6

Lingaraja temple in Bhubaneswar
To enable the viceroy Lord Curzon to get a look at the
temple

This is Barcelona’s oldest shopping centre: L’Illa
Diagonal which was built in 1993 by the architect
Rafael Moneo. The architecture was a first of its kind
in 1993 and in recent times has gathered a more
utilitarian sense. Some recent examples are the
Raffles City Chongqing project by the architect Moshe
Safdie and the HQ of Vanke in Shenzhen.
What 2 word term is used for such buildings?
7

Horizontal Skyscrapers

Scotland’s Orkney Islands is the site of a new initiative by this global
major. Under Project Natick, it has set-up a datacentre with 854
servers. This is a bet for the future, with the power source aimed at
being self-sustaining, going forward.
There are two primary reasons for Project Natick:
It can deliver great reduction in latency, given the relative location of
more than half of the world’s population
What is the initiative about?
What is the other obvious cost-reduction that is expected?
8

Underwater data centre by Microsoft
Natural cooling and consequent reduction in cooling
costs

In his native country he was called “The Pope”
because he was so often right. His estimations of very
complex problems just using back-of-the-envelope
calculations were such good examples of critical
thinking that recruiters nowadays test applicants’
mettle by setting them as interview questions. Such
questions are now commonly referred to by this
person’s name.
Who or What are these questions called?
1

Dimity, is a light-weight, sheer cotton fabric with a
particular technique/pattern forming fine cords.
Originally dimity was made of silk or wool, but since
the 18th century it has been woven almost exclusively
of cotton.
What does the name Dimity indicate?
2

A few weeks before November 15, 2017, an ‘event’ could have
triggered another “100-hour war” between Australia and country (X).
The root cause for the original100-hour war (1969) was a
controversial land reform act caused by the United Fruit Company in
neighboring countries X & Y.
However, the last straw was a similar ‘event’ that happened in
Jun-July of 1969 between X & Y.
What is this ‘event’ we are we talking about?
Identify X and Y.
3

In his native country he was called “The Pope”
because he was so often right. His estimations of very
complex problems just using back-of-the-envelope
calculations were such good examples of critical
thinking that recruiters nowadays test applicants’
mettle by setting them as interview questions. Such
questions are now commonly referred to by this
person’s name.
Who (or) What are these questions called?
1

Fermi Problems/Questions

Two Threads
from Greek dimitos, from di- ‘twice’ + mitos ‘warp thread’;
the origin of the final -y is unknown.

#soccerkills
Honduras vs El Salvador soccer match for the FIFA 1970 qualifiers
that triggered the 100-hour war also called the soccer war
The Aussies did the same thing in 2017 by trolling the Hondurans

While it may mean various things in different
sports, in this sport, it means a triple
achievement – winning the Olympics, World
Championships and the World Cup.
Ten people have achieved this feat so far.
The person in question is the answer to two
trivia questions related to this achievement.
Which sport and what is the
‘achievement’? (4 pts)
Who is this person? (2 pts)
What are the two records? (2+2 pts)
9

Table Tennis; Grand Slam
Jan-Ove Waldner
First player to achieve the Grand Slam
Only non-Chinese player to achieve the Grand Slam

Porcelain of the kind seen in the picture, comes
from a commune in France that is one of the
major centres for production in Europe.
This particular factory has been functional since
1740.
In 1920, the factory witnessed a historic
moment with the signing of a treaty here that
formalised a partition of sorts.
36 years later, one more ‘protocol’ was signed in
this town, a collusion between three countries,
which was later denied by all parties!
Which town? (5 pts.)
What were the two agreements? (5 pts.)
10

Sevres
Treaty of Sevres - Partitioning the Ottoman Empire
Sevres protocol between UK, France, Israel to ‘occupy’ the
Suez Canal

If you were a 70s and 80s child you must have seen these stamps.
They flooded the market, which is what eventually devalued them.
The stamps came about when an American entrepreneur saw the
opportunity to make them for the lucrative collector’s market, and
concluded a deal with this cash-strapped emirate which was reeling
after the crash of the pearl industry.
Initially, few people realised that the name listed as a “dependency”
on the stamp was only a remote agricultural village consisting of a
few adobe houses on a plain overlooked by the Hajar Mountains.
Which emirate? What were these stamps called?
11

Ajman
“Manama” stamps

Sir Elijah Impey, the chief justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta in
the 18th century, had a serious interest in the subcontinent, and respected
both its inhabitants and their culture. He learnt Bengali, Persian, and his
house became a meeting place where law, history, Sanskrit and Persian
literature were all animatedly and enthusiastically discussed.
He and his wife even began to collect a menagerie of rare Indian animals,
and at some stage in the late 1770s, the Impeys decided to take an
unprecedented step to deck up their private zoo. They summoned three
people all the way from Patna – Shaykh Zayn-al-Din, Bhawani Das, and
Ram Das, all well-trained professionals in the Mughal style. The Impeys
gave them the English perspective.
What did this commission mark the beginning of?
12

Company School of Painting
All three artists had clearly been trained in the old Mughal techniques of miniature painting, but
by working for the Impeys, using English watercolours on English paper, and taking English
botanical still life-s as their models, a fusion of English and Indian artistic impulses took place
that resulted in an entirely new type of painting known today as the Company School.

This infamous match was played between countries X and Y at Gijon, Spain
in the first round of the 1982 FIFA World Cup. The two countries played
out a pre-determined result, which allowed both teams to progress to the
next round. Post this match, FIFA changed the rules so that all last-leg
matches in a round would happen simultaneously.
There was a lot of backlash to this match in the media. Considering the
countries involved, this match was dubbed ________, referencing an event
that had taken place many decades earlier.
The local newspaper, El Comerico, was so furious that they did something
very unique when they printed the report of the match the next day.
Fill in the blank. What did El Comerico do?
13

Anschluss
Referring to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938
El Comercio, the local newspaper, printed the match report in
its crime section

This artefact was a sundial named after a group of people,
who used it in the Pyrenees mountains, and was popular
across the world in the 16th-18th centuries. It measured
differences in the sun's height above the horizon over the
course of the day, and did not need any directional
orientation.
This particular picture is an example of this kind of a dial, seen
in a famous 16th century work, as one of a multitude of
scientific objects seen there.
Identify the object and the work.
14

Shepherd’s dial
The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger

Ekushey means everything to the people of this nation, so much so
that several things are named so, such as Ekushey Padak its second
highest civilian award. They look back with pride at the time several
decades ago when students, politicians and the intelligentsia banded
together in a movement against the imposition of something.
Ekushey also sowed the seeds of the country’s Independence
movement.
What is Ekushey? Which is the country?
15

Ekushey means 21st. It refers to the Bengali Language
Movement in Bangladesh, which culminated in protests
on 21 February, 1952

This is a song written by George and Ira Gershwin for
the 1937 film Shall We Dance, where it was
introduced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as part
of a celebrated dance duet on roller skates.
What phrase/verse did it popularize?
16

Lets See the Answer…

You like potato and I like potahto…

2018 KQA MegaWhats Semi Finals 2

2018 KQA MegaWhats Semi Finals 2

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2018 KQA MegaWhats Semi Finals 2