Question-specific discussion (HFT 2014)
Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2014 6:23 pm
Use this thread to discuss specific questions.
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I don't want to pass judgement on a tossup haven't seen yet, but I'd wager that "anyone who's read it" is a possible answer to your question.pajaro bobo wrote:(How many people actually know what happens in that book well enough to even power that question?)
I had read The Master and Margarita in high school just for fun, and I was far from what one would call a "literature specialist" (and I wasn't trying to be, either). It's certainly possible that players in this field had read it, and I'd even expect a few. It's an important work, and beyond that a very entertaining, compelling, and interesting one; if you've read it, or even a summary, you'd find the novel's various episodes are quite memorable.pajaro bobo wrote:The tossup was almost certainly too hard, even for this set (How many people actually know what happens in that book well enough to even power that question?).
Hmmm, I'm surprised that The Master and Margarita is the lit tossup you thought was too hard; just within the first ten rounds, there were tossups on Fences, Lahiri, and Ishiguro that I had marked as the most difficult. It's been a while since high school, but I remember The Master and Margarita coming up quite a bit, and it was also powered in my room.pajaro bobo wrote:Could I see the TU on The Master and Margarita and the bonus that went Franklin/Speak, Memory/Dahl? I thought the set was decent for the most part but both of those questions were not very good ideas.
The tossup was almost certainly too hard, even for this set (How many people actually know what happens in that book well enough to even power that question?). The bonus had a middle-school level easy part paired with two really difficult bonus parts. Between the part about a Nabokov memoir that only told players the time period it covers and the title it was supposed to go by, and the part that gave a kinda-known-ish autobiographical work and some downright-obscure adult fiction, which was supposed to be the middle part?
If I'm not mistaken I believe my teammate Shrayus powered it quite early.pajaro bobo wrote:Could I see the TU on The Master and Margarita and the bonus that went Franklin/Speak, Memory/Dahl? I thought the set was decent for the most part but both of those questions were not very good ideas.
The tossup was almost certainly too hard, even for this set (How many people actually know what happens in that book well enough to even power that question?). The bonus had a middle-school level easy part paired with two really difficult bonus parts. Between the part about a Nabokov memoir that only told players the time period it covers and the title it was supposed to go by, and the part that gave a kinda-known-ish autobiographical work and some downright-obscure adult fiction, which was supposed to be the middle part?
pajaro bobo wrote:Could I see the TU on The Master and Margarita and the bonus that went Franklin/Speak, Memory/Dahl? I thought the set was decent for the most part but both of those questions were not very good ideas?
HFT IX wrote: At one point in this novel, a character shoots a pistol in a theater, causing banknotes to fall from the ceiling. At the beginning of this novel, a woman breaks a jug of sunflower-seed oil, leading another character to slip and be decapitated by a tram. That character in this novel is the head of a literary society housed in (*) Griboyedov’s House called MASSOLIT. In this novel, a poet is sent to an insane asylum, where he meets the author of a manuscript about the execution of Yeshua Ha-Notsri. In this novel, the cat Behemoth accompanies Satan, who is disguised as a professor named Woland. For 10 points, name this novel by Mikhail Bulgakov.
ANSWER: The Master and Margarita
Answer the following about memoirs, for 10 points each:
[10] This Founding Father described the growing success of his club, the Junto, and recounted his writing of Poor Richard’s Almanack in an unfinished autobiography which was published in 1791.
ANSWER: Benjamin Franklin
[10] This Vladimir Nabokov memoir which describes his life up to the year 1940 originally had a title that referred to “Mnemosyne,” but his publishers were concerned that American audiences wouldn’t be able to pronounce the word.
ANSWER: Speak, Memory
[10] This British author described his upbringing and wartime experiences in the memoirs Boy and Going Solo. This author’s short story collections include Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.
ANSWER: Roald Dahl
I agree with this.Cheynem wrote:That bonus is pretty rough for a high school one. Expecting high schoolers to know Speak, Memory seems excessive and while "Boy" is reasonably notable, some descriptions about Dahl's other books or characters might have been nice so it isn't just a total title recognition thing.
Schmidt Sting Pain Index wrote:Can I see tossups on Tibet, Urals, WWI, Netherlands, Hawaii, Afghanistan War, and Alexander the Great? Thanks
HFT IX wrote:This modern-day region was ruled by the Phagmodrupa Dynasty, and its namesake empire lasted from the 7th to the 9th centuries and was founded by Namri Songtsen. Hundreds of soldiers from this polity were killed in the Massacre of Chumik Shenko during a turn-of-the-century expedition led by Colonel Francis Younghusband intended to resolve this polity’s border dispute with (*) Sikkim. This polity was incorporated into a country following the Battle of Chamdo, after which its leader Tenzin Gyatso fled to India from this polity’s capital of Lhasa. For 10 points, name this autonomous region of China whose spiritual leader is the Dalai Lama.
ANSWER: Tibet Autonomous Region [accept Tibetan Empire; accept Bod Rang Skyong Ljongs; accept Xizang Zizhiqu]
Kholat Syakhl, or the “Dead Mountain,” is located in this mountain range, which is home to the Mansi people. The Manpupuner rock formations are a popular tourist attraction in the Komi Republic just west of this range, and Vaygach Island and Novaya Zemlya are a northern continuation of these mountains. The south of this mountain range is home to its country’s largest iron and steel works at Magnitogorsk in (*) Chelyabinsk Oblast. These mountains extend south from the Kara Sea to Kazakhstan. For 10 points, name this mountain range that traditionally divides Russia into Asian and European parts.
ANSWER: Ural Mountains [accept Uralskiye Gory]
The Wafd Party was founded in the aftermath of this conflict, and a kingdom in Syria founded by Faisal lasted for four months following this conflict. A man made famous by the journalist Lowell Thomas led forces at the Battle of Tafileh during this conflict, during which an exchange of letters between Henry McMahon and Husayn bin Ali led to the (*) Arab Revolt. The Treaty of Sevres occurred in the aftermath of this conflict, the end of which also led to the May Fourth Movement. The exploits of T. E. Lawrence occurred during this conflict. For 10 points, name this war between the Central and Allied Powers between 1914 and 1918.
ANSWER: World War I [accept the Arab Revolt before read]
After establishing a trading post at Kingston, settlers from this country were led by Captain Martin Cregier in a series of two conflicts with the Esopus tribe. It’s not Portugal, but traders from this country were confined to an artificial island named Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. This country placed the Banda Islands under the monopoly of the (*) VOC, and traded the Island of Run for a North American island in the Treaty of Breda. One of this country’s colonies granted large landholdings to men called patroons and was governed by Peter Stuyvesant. For 10 points, name this country that colonized Suriname, Indonesia, and modern-day Manhattan, calling it New Amsterdam.
ANSWER: The Netherlands
The murder of Louis Stolz by a leper in this polity prompted an 1893 invasion. The end of this polity’s occupation by Britain during the Paulet Affair is celebrated on this polity’s Restoration Day. Inappropriate revolutionary activities in this polity were discussed in the Blount Report, which was contradicted by the (*) Morgan Report. A counterrevolution by Robert Wilcox followed the passage of this polity’s Bayonet Constitution. Planters led by Sanford Dole staged a coup against the monarchy of Queen Liliuokalani [lily-o-kal-AH-nee] in this polity, creating a republic annexed by the United States in 1898. For 10 points, name kingdom that later became the fiftieth U.S. state.
ANSWER: Kingdom of Hawai’i
During this conflict, British soldiers destroyed a base near the Kajakai Dam as part of Operation Achilles, and a commander using the pseudonym “Dalton Fury” criticized an operation in this war that occurred at a cave complex in the White Mountains. The Haqqani Network allied with one side in this conflict, which was kicked off by an invasion of the Shahi-Lot Valley in Operation (*) Anaconda. This war was announced in Operation Enduring Freedom following a faction’s unwillingness to hand over Osama bin Laden. For 10 points, name this military action in a Central Asian nation that began following the events of September 11, 2001.
ANSWER: Afghanistan War [or NATO/US invasion of Afghanistan]
This man married the princesses Parysatis and Stateira in a mass wedding he ordered at Susa, and besieged the mountain of Pir-Sar at the end of his Cophen Campaign. Rumors of an assassination plot led him to order the deaths of Philotas and Parmenion, and he killed Cleitus the Black during a drunken quarrel. This man built a (*) causeway to capture the Phoenician city of Tyre. The period after this ruler’s death is generally termed the Hellenistic period, and it his death also spurred a series of wars between the Diadochi. This man rode the horse Bucephalus and cut the Gordian knot. For 10 points, name this student of Aristotle and conquering king of Macedonia.
ANSWER: Alexander the Great [accept Alexander III of Macedonia; prompt on “Alexander”]
Are you referring to the bonus that included Carmichael Numbers in round 8?ndikkala wrote:There was a difficult math bonus in one of the rounds that I wanted to look at again. I know for sure that it wasn't in rounds 9 or 10. I think it was the round that had the azide bonus, or possibly the round before that. If you can identify it, could you please list it?
Zaha Hadid is a staple of the architecture distribution. Also:Shangdevin wrote:please correct me if I'm wrong but the only female architect that has ever been tossed up is Maya Lin.
Fernando Arrabal Packet 04 wrote:19. One major building designed by this architect is six stories tall and contains a recessed Romanesque entrance archway, as well as a notable grand staircase with a vaulted ceiling supported by Corinthian columns and flanked by shield-bearing gargoyles, also designed by this architect. This architect’s design of the Ming Quon home led to a commission for a building that mixed a Renaissance floor plan with traditional Chinese elements. While working under John Galen Howard, this architect created the preliminary design for both the Sather Gate and the Greek Theatre on the Berkeley campus, and this architect’s other Bay Area work includes the bell tower at Mills College, the Chinatown YWCA, and the aforementioned Berkeley Women’s Club. This architect’s most famous work features the twin towers of the Casa Grande in the Mediterranean style as well as the thrice-rebuilt Neptune Pool surrounded by classical colonnades, and is located in San Simeon. For 10 points, identify this architect responsible for the design and construction of Hearst Castle.
ANSWER: Julia Morgan
In the architecture distribution in general or just the college one?Cody wrote:Zaha Hadid is a staple of the architecture distribution.Shangdevin wrote:please correct me if I'm wrong but the only female architect that has ever been tossed up is Maya Lin.
She obviously comes up more in college, but she's really important - enough so that it's foolish to hear a question on a female architect and assume there's no chance it's her, even in high school.pajaro bobo wrote:In the architecture distribution in general or just the college one?Cody wrote:Zaha Hadid is a staple of the architecture distribution.Shangdevin wrote:please correct me if I'm wrong but the only female architect that has ever been tossed up is Maya Lin.
I don't think that your comment here is really fair: for the most part the tossups' difficulties seemed to be right on par with slightly-above average hs difficulty. However, I do agree that the third parts of the bonuses leave much to be desired. Overall the bonuses' difficulty cliffs are the major problem and once that's fixed everything should be fine.Cody wrote: It takes true talent to churn out such egregiously bad questions -- please stop producing high school sets.
My comment is well above and beyond fair. A couple of years ago, I thought Harvard had turned the corner with HFT and that they might actually produce a usable, and maybe even good, set in the future. Instead, HFT has gotten worse by orders of magnitude -- many of the bonuses mentioned in this thread are vintage Andy-Watkins-era HFT.Shangdevin wrote:I don't think that your comment here is really fair: for the most part the tossups' difficulties seemed to be right on par with slightly-above average hs difficulty. However, I do agree that the third parts of the bonuses leave much to be desired. Overall the bonuses' difficulty cliffs are the major problem and once that's fixed everything should be fine.Cody wrote: It takes true talent to churn out such egregiously bad questions -- please stop producing high school sets.
This is a totally valid criticism. I'm not trying to throw Sriram under the bus here, but he consistently writes pretty difficult hard parts. Raynor did a great job of toning most of them down, I think, but it's clear that too many slipped through. Raynor and I aren't science players, so developing an intuition for what's an HFT-level science hard part versus, say, a Regionals-level science hard part is tricky.Santa Claus wrote:I have to agree with some of the sentiments about the particularly hard third parts in bonuses, especially in the science. While some were reasonable progressions from one to another, there were a lot of third parts that were hard for one reason or another.
I'd be interested in hearing more opinions on whether the problem of super-difficult hard parts was mostly contained to the science—that is, whether it was a systematic problem in any other single category, or in the set as a whole. The myth bonus that Charlie mentioned was:Corry wrote:Like... many other people, I also echo concerns that a lot of 3rd parts in this tournament seemed randomly too hard. I realize that the point of HFT is to have "harder to 30" bonuses than a regular-difficulty high school set, but the jump in some cases was quite unusual. I'll probably have specific examples tomorrow after I read through the entire set one more time.
Looking at this now, I think the hard part could've been written more descriptively, but it's an event from the Poetic Edda that Raynor found memorable enough to write about.6. This god transformed into a snake to retrieve the divine mead of inspiration. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this chief god of the Norse myth system. He has one eye and is advised by the ravens Hunin and Mugin.
ANSWER: Odin [accept Woden]
[10] Odin hung himself for nine days from the World Tree to understand this somewhat magical writing system.
ANSWER: runes
[10] Odin won two riddle contests by asking this final question, upon which the opponent realized they were facing Odin and surrendered. A general description is acceptable.
ANSWER: what Odin whispered in Balder’s ear at Balder’s funeral [accept anything involving saying something to Balder]
I think you're conflating variability in answerline difficulty with potentially misplaced/transparent clues here.charliemannetc wrote:I understand that this set touted itself as "some answerlines you'd find in A-sets, and some you'd find in HSNCT", but I have to say that felt like more of an excuse for a wildly variable difficulty range than it did an actual legitimate structure for a tournament. Rather than being "fun for everyone" and inclusive to all difficulties, it was just really frustrating at times. Personally, my mindset / buzzing strategy is very dependent on the difficulty of the tournament I'm playing - I'm going to tend to think a lot more laterally and make risky buzzes on an easy packet, but if I'm playing on a hard packet I know that "it's either the Tokugawa Shogunate or the Meiji Restoration" kind of attitudes don't really work.
The trouble comes when you have a mix of those two. Take, for example, the incredibly transparent tossups on mosques that was in my experience almost universally disliked. (could you post that, by the way?). Most people I talked to immediately discounted a mosque answerline after the first line just because it seemed far too obvious - some said they were considering buzzing things like "minaret" or something, and not until far later in the clue did it become painfully obvious that "mosques" was really the answer the whole time. A similar thing occurred when the Hades tossup namedropped Rhadamanthus on the first line (unless i'm grossly underestimating the difficulty of that clue, that is pushing it for even an IS-A packet. Could I see that one too?)
While having strangely-easy tossups is annoying, the real problem comes when tossups like those are right next to rather hard tossups on stuff like the Heian period that tend to come up in college.
This question might clearly be pointing to a place of worship early on, but I'm not sure that it's obviously a mosque.HFT wrote: On one holiday, men usually travel to one of these locations at daybreak to perform a bayram prayer. A prayer urging “hasten to success” is declared from these locations. The “farthest” one of these was the end destination of the Night Journey and is located in Jerusalem. In these locations, the minbar are generally located to the right of the (*) mihrab. The calling of the adhan draws people to this place, an action that is performed by the muezzin. One of these locations surrounds the Kaaba, and salat occurs in them five times a day. For 10 points, name these buildings surrounded by minarets, the sites of Islamic worship.
ANSWER: mosques [or mosjid]
I tried to avoid making the easy parts pedantically easy most of the time, but we did want the vast majority of teams to get the vast majority of easy parts. (A lengthy discussion about this took place in HFT VII's thread, if I remember correctly). It's impossible not to include some gimme easy parts—to pick an example easy part from this year's set that played too difficult, a considerable number of teams missed the "Henry James" easy part of a Henry James bonus. I'd rather overcorrect for easy parts that are too hard than leave them.charliemannetc wrote: Similarly to the tossups, the difficulty of hard parts was made far worse by how insultingly easy the easy - and often, the medium - parts were. There was quite frequently very little distinction between the easy and medium parts of the bonus, which made the cliff all the more dramatic. I get the concept of offering a set that most teams can clear 10 PPB on and creating an experience that teams of all levels can enjoy, but I don't think that offering a set with huge variation in bonus and tossup difficulty is the way to go about doing that. All this ended up doing was lure inexperienced players into an idea that this set was something they could actually have fun playing and annoy more experienced players with the huge disparities in difficulty.
Mavis Beacon wrote:May I see the tossups on 'Bridges,' 'Drones,' and 'Diffusion' from Round 1? Thanks.
EDIT: Also having 'Kitsch' as a hard part for a bonus seems a little too challenging, especially compared to some of the other FA bonuses (ie the cello bonus).
Harvard Fall Tournament IX Round 1 wrote:9. Joseph Stella is best known for his Precisionist paintings of one of these entities in New York. In a painting by Gustave Caillebotte [kye-BO] set on one of these entities “of Europe,” a dog walks away from the viewer and a couple walks toward the viewer. While in Arles, Vincent Van Gogh produced a series of four paintings showing women in multicolored hats washing clothing near one of these entities. One of these entities at (*) Old Battersea is shown in James Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold, and Claude Monet included a Japanese-style one of these in several of his early paintings of water lilies. For 10 points, name these structures that span bodies of water.
ANSWER: bridges
3. In 2014, Martha Stewart wrote a TIME article about her love of these entities, and Nabila Rehman testified to Congress about these entities. These entities are used in instances of so-called “double tapping.” In December 2013, Jeff Bezos announced that these entities would soon be used by (*) Amazon. Rand Paul filibustered the Senate for nearly 13 hours to oppose the nomination of John Brennan over his involvement with the American use of these entities, one of which was used to kill the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. For 10 points, name this type of aircraft that is operated remotely.
ANSWER: drones [Accept Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or Unmanned Air(craft) Systems, or Remote Piloted Aircraft Systems.]
16. This process can be modeled by the simplest case of the three-dimensional Langevin dynamics. The Einstein-Smoluchowski relation equates particle mobility times Boltzmann’s constant times temperature to the namesake coefficient of this process; that namesake coefficient is the proportionality constant between the positional derivative of concentration and the flux of this process in (*) Fick’s law. Graham’s law predicts the rate of a special case of this process involving gas and a pinhole. When water undergoes this process through a membrane, it is called osmosis. For 10 points, name this process where particles from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.
ANSWER: diffusion [accept Brownian motion before first instance of “namesake coefficient”; prompt on “effusion” or “osmosis” before mentioned]
I would like to make a point that when I got that third part, I initially said "what Odin whispered into his son's ear", for which the mod was very unsure what to do, before I elaborated with "what Odin said in the ear of his son Baldr at his funeral before he was set on fire on his boat" somewhat facetiously. At no point do they ever name Baldr in the original text; he's just "[Odin's] son". If you insist on keeping that answer line, you might want to change it slightly so that the answer line is "what Odin whispered in his son's ear [accept Baldr in place of son]" or something like that.6. This god transformed into a snake to retrieve the divine mead of inspiration. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this chief god of the Norse myth system. He has one eye and is advised by the ravens Hunin and Mugin.
ANSWER: Odin [accept Woden]
[10] Odin hung himself for nine days from the World Tree to understand this somewhat magical writing system.
ANSWER: runes
[10] Odin won two riddle contests by asking this final question, upon which the opponent realized they were facing Odin and surrendered. A general description is acceptable.
ANSWER: what Odin whispered in Balder’s ear at Balder’s funeral [accept anything involving saying something to Balder]
Though that is a mythology clue, I didn't write this question; I'll let Will respond. Due to my lack of Hindu myth knowledge, I probably wouldn't be able to respond anyway.HFT IX Round 6 wrote:12. A goddess normally depicted standing atop an intertwined Kama and Rati performed this action to herself during the god-demon war, and is named Chinnamasta. Saint Denis preached a sermon after this action occurred to him on Montmartre [mon-MAR-truh], making him a cephalophore. In an Oscar Wilde play, a character demands that this action be performed on Jokanaan after performing the Dance of the (*) Seven Veils, and Sir Gawain performs this action on the Green Knight upon his arrival in Camelot with surprisingly non-fatal results. For 10 points, name this punishment which saw frequent use during the Reign of Terror via the guillotine.
ANSWER: beheading [accept descriptive equivalents, such as decapitation]
Sure thing! I can't say whether the problem was systematic, since I only know things about history and geography-- that being said, both categories had quite a few "clunkers" in terms of difficulty (probably more than any other set this year except Maryland Fall). This issue was exacerbated by the fact that the medium parts of bonuses were usually quite normal, making the transition to the unexpectedly difficult hard part particularly jarring. Here are a few of the more noticeable examples that I found reading the set once through:hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:I'd be interested in hearing more opinions on whether the problem of super-difficult hard parts was mostly contained to the science—that is, whether it was a systematic problem in any other single category, or in the set as a whole.
Could I actually see the bonuses for each of these, and the tossup on feldspars? Also, Corry, I had totally forgot about the Hymir bonus, and man, that was too hard.Santa Claus wrote: Coulomb's law-method of image-infinite plane of charge
polyploidy-speciation-orthologous
galaxy-Hubble-Triangulum
inverse-first isomorphism-commutative
nitrogen-azide-N2O3
deserts-rain shadow-yardangs
enzymes-Arrhenius-Michaelis-Menten
uncertainty principle-time-matrix mechanics
drosophila melanogaster-Watson & Crick-Warburg
B cells-MHC-autoimmune
Millikan oil drop experiment-Thomson-Moseley
Alright, this makes a bit more sense now with Kevin's distinction as well. The way this question is written (e.g. the answer explicitly necessitating Baldr) references something that only comes up in the Hervarar Saga ("... what did Odin say in Baldr’s ear before he was raised on the pyre?”), while the version in the Poetic Edda just states "his son". However, because it says "two riddle contests", it makes sense to only accept answers with Baldr in it - in fact, as Kevin said, when he answered just saying "son", our mod asked him "can you tell me the name of the son?", and then asked us if it was okay if he got the points for it. That's probably why when I was trying to figure out where this even came from, nothing from the far more common source came up. I imagine this problem came up because Wikipedia explicitly states that he asks about Baldr.hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Hey guys, thanks for all of your feedback. I'll try to respond to most of it—let me know if there's anything I miss.
I'd be interested in hearing more opinions on whether the problem of super-difficult hard parts was mostly contained to the science—that is, whether it was a systematic problem in any other single category, or in the set as a whole. The myth bonus that Charlie mentioned was:Corry wrote:Like... many other people, I also echo concerns that a lot of 3rd parts in this tournament seemed randomly too hard. I realize that the point of HFT is to have "harder to 30" bonuses than a regular-difficulty high school set, but the jump in some cases was quite unusual. I'll probably have specific examples tomorrow after I read through the entire set one more time.
Looking at this now, I think the hard part could've been written more descriptively, but it's an event from the Poetic Edda that Raynor found memorable enough to write about.6. This god transformed into a snake to retrieve the divine mead of inspiration. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this chief god of the Norse myth system. He has one eye and is advised by the ravens Hunin and Mugin.
ANSWER: Odin [accept Woden]
[10] Odin hung himself for nine days from the World Tree to understand this somewhat magical writing system.
ANSWER: runes
[10] Odin won two riddle contests by asking this final question, upon which the opponent realized they were facing Odin and surrendered. A general description is acceptable.
ANSWER: what Odin whispered in Balder’s ear at Balder’s funeral [accept anything involving saying something to Balder]
Maybe, but I don't know if I really could compare answerline difficulty in a set of this level. The things that come up in high school quizbowl are important because they're important at most any level - with few exceptions. I don't really think there's much of a lower end of answerline difficulty - I can't think of any reason why one couldn't write a regionals+ level question on a common high school topic like Kant or Odin - in fact, I know for a fact that it's done all the time.hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:I think you're conflating variability in answerline difficulty with potentially misplaced/transparent clues here.charliemannetc wrote:I understand that this set touted itself as "some answerlines you'd find in A-sets, and some you'd find in HSNCT", but I have to say that felt like more of an excuse for a wildly variable difficulty range than it did an actual legitimate structure for a tournament. Rather than being "fun for everyone" and inclusive to all difficulties, it was just really frustrating at times. Personally, my mindset / buzzing strategy is very dependent on the difficulty of the tournament I'm playing - I'm going to tend to think a lot more laterally and make risky buzzes on an easy packet, but if I'm playing on a hard packet I know that "it's either the Tokugawa Shogunate or the Meiji Restoration" kind of attitudes don't really work.
The trouble comes when you have a mix of those two. Take, for example, the incredibly transparent tossups on mosques that was in my experience almost universally disliked. (could you post that, by the way?). Most people I talked to immediately discounted a mosque answerline after the first line just because it seemed far too obvious - some said they were considering buzzing things like "minaret" or something, and not until far later in the clue did it become painfully obvious that "mosques" was really the answer the whole time. A similar thing occurred when the Hades tossup namedropped Rhadamanthus on the first line (unless i'm grossly underestimating the difficulty of that clue, that is pushing it for even an IS-A packet. Could I see that one too?)
While having strangely-easy tossups is annoying, the real problem comes when tossups like those are right next to rather hard tossups on stuff like the Heian period that tend to come up in college.
HFT wrote: On one holiday, men usually travel to one of these locations at daybreak to perform a bayram prayer. A prayer urging “hasten to success” is declared from these locations. The “farthest” one of these was the end destination of the Night Journey and is located in Jerusalem. In these locations, the minbar are generally located to the right of the (*) mihrab. The calling of the adhan draws people to this place, an action that is performed by the muezzin. One of these locations surrounds the Kaaba, and salat occurs in them five times a day. For 10 points, name these buildings surrounded by minarets, the sites of Islamic worship.
ANSWER: mosques [or mosjid]
Yeah, I got a little rambly at the end. Sorry about that.hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:
I tried to avoid making the easy parts pedantically easy most of the time, but we did want the vast majority of teams to get the vast majority of easy parts. (A lengthy discussion about this took place in HFT VII's thread, if I remember correctly). It's impossible not to include some gimme easy parts—to pick an example easy part from this year's set that played too difficult, a considerable number of teams missed the "Henry James" easy part of a Henry James bonus. I'd rather overcorrect for easy parts that are too hard than leave them.
I'm a little more surprised about your comment about the middle parts; looking at the distribution of PPBs across sites, there seems to be a good spread of teams between 10 PPB and 20 PPB. And, Charlie, La Jolla is a Top 30 team—I'm not saying that you're totally wrong, but consider that your perspective on the difficulty of the middle parts might be distorted by the fact that your team knows lots of things.
Finally, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say in your last few sentences here. Can you clarify?
Here they are...all of them...Santa Claus wrote:Could I actually see the bonuses for each of these, and the tossup on feldspars? Also, Corry, I had totally forgot about the Hymir bonus, and man, that was too hard.Santa Claus wrote: Coulomb's law-method of image-infinite plane of charge
polyploidy-speciation-orthologous
galaxy-Hubble-Triangulum
inverse-first isomorphism-commutative
nitrogen-azide-N2O3
deserts-rain shadow-yardangs
enzymes-Arrhenius-Michaelis-Menten
uncertainty principle-time-matrix mechanics
drosophila melanogaster-Watson & Crick-Warburg
B cells-MHC-autoimmune
Millikan oil drop experiment-Thomson-Moseley
Various rounds of HFT IX wrote:14. Like Newton’s law of universal gravitation, this law is an inverse square law. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this law that sets the force between two electric charges proportional to the product of their charges divided by their separation distance squared.
ANSWER: Coulomb’s law
[10] Coulomb’s law is often not useful for calculating the electric potential for a distribution of charges. This method of calculating the potential introduces imaginary charges into the problem that replicate the original problem’s boundary conditions, but simplify the analysis.
ANSWER: method of image charges [accept method of mirror charges]
[10] Instead of using Coulomb’s law or the method of image charges, one can use Gauss’s law for symmetric distributions. Using Gauss’s law on this charge distribution gives a uniform electric field of magnitude equal to the charge density over two times the permittivity of free space.
ANSWER: uniformly charged infinite plane [accept clear equivalents like “sheet”]
2. The Plains Viscacha Rat is one of the very few mammals to have this property, for 10 points each:
[10] This word describes any cell or organism that has more than two sets of chromosomes. Species that exhibit this property include wheat, which has 6 copies of each chromosome, and cotton, which has 4 copies.
ANSWER: polyploidy
[10] Polyploidy is one of the most common sympatric methods for this event to occur in flowering plants. One variety of this event can also be described as allopatric, and is often caused by a geological barrier.
ANSWER: speciation [accept word forms]
[10] Genes in two different species that share the same common ancestor as a result of speciation are known by this name. These genes often have the same function in different species.
ANSWER: orthologous genes [or orthologs]
20. M81 is an example of one of these. For 10 points each:
[10] Name these gravitationally-bound collections of billions of stars that can exist in spiral, elliptical, or irregular geometries.
ANSWER: galaxies
[10] This astronomer created a namesake “tuning fork diagram”, a morphological classification of galaxies into ellipticals, lenticulars, and spirals. His namesake law describes the expansion of the universe.
ANSWER: Edwin Hubble
[10] This third largest member of the local group is one of the farthest objects visible with the naked eye. Its not Andromeda, but the analysis of 35 of its Cepheids by Hubble allowed him to estimate its distance in 1935.
ANSWER: Triangulum galaxy
8. For each element in a group, some element must exist such that their product under the group operation is equal to the identity. For 10 points each:
[10] Name the term used to describe that element. Less strictly speaking, when this operation is applied to a function of x, it “undoes” that function and returns another function whose composition with the original function is x.
ANSWER: inverse
[10] In group theory, this theorem states that for a homomorphism phi mapping elements in group G to group H, there exists a group isomorphism between G mod the kernel of phi and the image of phi.
ANSWER: first isomorphism theorem
[10] An abelian group has this property between its elements. In general, matrix multiplication does not have this property.
ANSWER: commutativity [accept commute or other word forms]
5. This is the most common gas in the atmosphere. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this diatomic gas often used to produce inert environments, which has a triple bond between two atoms of its namesake element.
ANSWER: nitrogen gas [accept dinitrogen; prompt on “N”]
[10] Nitrogen also forms this polyatomic ion containing three nitrogen atoms and a negative charge. Its sodium salt is used in car airbags.
ANSWER: azide
[10] This unstable nitrogen compound is a deep blue solid below -21 degrees Celsius. It is the acid anhydride of nitrous acid.
ANSWER: dinitrogen trioxide [accept N2O3]
3. The Atacama is the driest one of these regions on planet Earth. For 10 points each:
[10] Name these arid regions characterized by a lack of vegetation.
ANSWER: deserts
[10] These types of deserts form on the leeward sides of mountains, and are often geographically mid-latitude. This is because air loses its water content as precipitation as it crosses a mountain range, and is subsequently compressed and heated as it descends.
ANSWER: rainshadow desert
[10] These rock features, common in the Sahara desert, are small landforms with narrow bases and wide tops. They are formed by sandblasting that is most intense near the ground.
ANSWER: yardangs
3. Examples of these include catalase and carbonic anhydrase. For 10 points each:
[10] Name these biological catalysts whose three-dimensional conformation is the subject of major study.
ANSWER: enzymes
[10] Enzymes, like all catalysts, lower the activation energy of reactions. This equation from reaction kinetics explains how the rate constant is proportional to the exponential of the negative activation energy over RT.
ANSWER: Arrhenius equation
[10] This model of enzyme kinetics assumes the reversible association of enzyme and substrate to form an enzyme-substrate complex, which irreversibly forms enzyme and product. This model predicts a linear association between one over rate and one over substrate concentration.
ANSWER: Michaelis-Menten kinetics
1. This principle stems from the fact that the position and momentum operators in quantum mechanics do not commute. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this principle stated which asserts that the more precisely the position of a particle is known, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice-versa.
ANSWER: Heisenberg uncertainty principle [accept either or both underlined parts]
[10] Although position and momentum are one set complementary variables with an uncertainty relation, energy and this quantity are another set. The dilation of this general quantity is a consequence of special relativity.
ANSWER: lifetime of a state
[10] Along with Born and Jordan in 1925, Heisenberg developed this mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, which treated operators like position and momentum as time-dependent, and states as time-independent.
ANSWER: matrix mechanics
15. Answer these questions about scientists who have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for 10 points each:
[10] In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan won the Nobel Prize for discovering the “role played by the chromosome in heredity” by studying these organisms, which have four pairs of chromosomes.
ANSWER: fruit flies [accept Drosophila or D. melanogaster]
[10] This pair of scientists, along with Maurice Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA.
ANSWER: James Watson and Francis Crick [prompt on partial answer]
[10] In 1931, this scientist won the Nobel Prize for his research on cytochrome and its role in respiration, especially in sea urchin eggs post fertilization. Sir Hans Krebs, who received the award for discovering the citric acid cycle, worked in this scientist’s lab.
ANSWER: Otto Heinrich Warburg
6. Along with T cells, this type of cells are collectively known as lymphocytes. For 10 points each,
[10] Name these cells whose plasma variety are responsible for producing antibodies. These cells are actually not named for the marrow in which they are created.
ANSWER: B cells
[10] The class I type of this molecule presents antigens on the surface of an infected cell to cytotoxic T cells, which identifies it through use of CD8. The class II type of this molecule is recognized by CD4 on helper T cells, which triggers B cell activation.
ANSWER: MHC (accept Major Histocompatibility Complex)
[10] This type of disease can occur when antibodies fail to distinguish self-proteins from non-self proteins and begin attacking them. Examples of this type of disease include multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
ANSWER: autoimmune disease
4. This experiment was conducted in the University of Chicago in 1909. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this experiment that measured the charge of the electron from the terminal velocities of charged oil droplets.
ANSWER: Millikan oil drop experiment
[10] Once the electron’s charge was known, its mass could be immediately calculated because this scientist had previously calculated the mass-to-charge ratio of the electron in 1897. He also used the cathode ray tube experiment to discover the electron.
ANSWER: Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson
[10] This other English physicist, a contemporary of J.J. Thomson, names a law that shows a quadratic relationship between the frequency of the K-alpha characteristic X-ray emission of atoms and their atomic number, which historically confirmed the atomic nucleus model.
ANSWER: Henry Moseley
Thanks for the reply. I was under the impression that making final rounds harder than regular rounds in a set was now a deprecated practice, but I guess I'm alright with that.hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Thanks, again, for providing extended feedback. I'll post the requested questions once I'm back at my computer (or maybe Raynor can). Corry, I actually disagree with you on several of your difficulty assessments, and while this is anecdotal, a lot of the specific difficult answerlines you provided were converted by teams for which I read. I don't think it's useful for me to systematically go through and explain why I deemed each one an appropriate hard part (and I agree with you on a few of them: Churchill, Hymir, Goguryeo), but I will if you want. The last two rounds were intended to be a step up in difficulty, so I'm actually cool with MUT-level hard parts such as Bashir Gemayel and Gromyko in those rounds.