ANGST: Weaker Questions

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kdroge
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ANGST: Weaker Questions

Post by kdroge »

I just wanted to know what questions people thought were bad or should have been changed. I'll lead off with a few things that I noticed at the tournament.

-The Joshua tossup needed to be reordered as the clues about the monument are almost certainly harder than the circled a city seven times type of clues.

-The Gordon/Skinner/Bandura bonus should had one of the last two parts be a little harder and not give their most famous doings.

-The ISLM/Mundell Fleming/Fixed Exchange Rate bonus should have just asked for 'exchange rate' and given fixed to be easier.

-The fractals tossup lead-in was super weak. Not entirely sure how this one happened, since I talked to Sinan and he didn't put there, but having Hausdorff in the first line led to a lot of races.

-The Waterloo tossup needed a harder lead-in as I'm pretty sure a lot of buzzers went down on the first clue.

-The Solow/Samuelsson/MIT bonus should have had easier clues for MIT; I'm not sure exactly which ones, since most of the architecture clues were used already in an FA bonus, but most people guessed Harvard for the last part off the Geo clues and that was supposed to be an easy part.

-The Byron tossup in the finals needed should not have dropped "She Walks in Beauty" Quotes earlier than "Prisoner of Chillon" quotes; my thinking here was that people who didn't know any quotes could fraud it off description of a dude in chains, but it just probably led to a lot of races around the power mark when people realized what was going on.

-For the CE bonus with Clegg/Trinidad and Tobago/Thailand dude, this may have needed an easier part than Clegg, though on this one I'm not so sure.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head- but I'm sure there's more.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by women, fire and dangerous things »

I haven't seen the set yet, but as I recall the tossup on indulgences was pretty transparent.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by jonpin »

kdroge wrote:-The ISLM/Mundell Fleming/Fixed Exchange Rate bonus should have just asked for 'exchange rate' and given fixed to be easier.
I pseudo-prompted on "pegging currency" and when they said "fixing it to the dollar" I gave it to them.
-The fractals tossup lead-in was super weak. Not entirely sure how this one happened, since I talked to Sinan and he didn't put there, but having Hausdorff in the first line led to a lot of races.
I was surprised by that lead-in, too, expecting that "things with weird dimensions" would lead to a massive buzzer race on fractals.
-The Solow/Samuelsson/MIT bonus should have had easier clues for MIT; I'm not sure exactly which ones, since most of the architecture clues were used already in an FA bonus, but most people guessed Harvard for the last part off the Geo clues and that was supposed to be an easy part.
That happened in my room, the team pondered "MIT? Or maybe Harvard? I don't think it's Harvard. Let's say Harvard." "It's MIT." Didn't seem like it was too bad.
-For the CE bonus with Clegg/Trinidad and Tobago/Thailand dude, this may have needed an easier part than Clegg, though on this one I'm not so sure.
If you want to get current event points, you should read a newspaper. If you read newspaper articles about the British elections, you read about Nick Clegg. Maybe it was too hard to be an easy part, and Cameron would've been better, but I think it was probably fine.
women, fire and dangerous things wrote:I haven't seen the set yet, but as I recall the tossup on indulgences was pretty transparent.
Yeah, while I was reading that tossup I thought "there's no out-and-out giveaway clue, but 'Thing which churches were awarding for doing stuff' has to be indulgences, doesn't it?"

There may have been a few more worth discussion and if I look back at the set, I might comment, but by and large for what you stepped in to do, I think it was good.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

I did some work on the literature for this tournament (largely on the bonuses), so please give me feedback on how it went,
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Ringil »

Cernel Joson wrote:I did some work on the literature for this tournament (largely on the bonuses), so please give me feedback on how it went,
Just a quick comment on this bonus:
10. For 10 points each, name some things about a classic of Chinese literature.
[10] This 16th-century work of Wu Cheng'en sees its primate protagonist trapped under a mountain for 500 years before he is released to become a Taoist disciple of a monk and accompany him on the title quest.
ANSWER: Journey to the West (or Xi You Ji or Monkey)
[10] The Monkey King must defend this monk from demons who want to gain immortality by eating him. While conducting the ceremony of Shui Lu Da Hui, this man is told to make a pilgrimage to the Western Heaven.
ANSWER: Xuanzang (accept Tan San Zang or Tripitaka)
[10] Along with the monkey king, two other warriors accompany Xuanzong on the journey. Name either.
ANSWER: Zhu Ba Jie or Xia Wu Jing (also accept: Pigsy or Sandy)
The main problem I have is that you don't allow the most well known answers for two of the People. Xuanzang is generally known as Tang Seng and Sha Wu Jing as Sha He Shang. You also gave Xia Wu Jing instead of Sha Wu Jing. Otherwise, this was a pretty awesome bonus :)
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Gautam »

Some things that have come up so far in the packets I've read at Minnesota practices:

* Weeks v US and Wolf v. Colorado are kind of stale clues that have increasingly been coming up as late-middle clues. Perhaps they shouldn't have been in the 2nd line.

* The tossup on the Zulu wars was a negbait for a battle from the Zulu wars (atleast 3 people I know did this, including my own teammate at the main site.)

* The Achebe tossup was kind of weak, I thought, but I'm not really sure how I can describe it... the yams clue kind of did it for me I guess.

* the tossup on PHP was really weak... It seemed to basically say "this is a server-side scripting language which had a recently released 4th verion" and we just played chicken out of disbelief.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by alkrav112 »

The Achebe question was mine -- just thought I'd post the original for reference:

One of this author's short stories sees Veronica try to poison her employer's baby with red ink, while another describes the calm following his nation's civil war. In addition to "Vengeful Creditor" and "Civil Peace," he wrote two stories in which greedy protagonists are punished by spirits: a boastful wife in "The Flute" and a tortoise in "The Drum." He wrote a novel which sees the corrupt Minister of Culture, Chief Nanga, brought down in a coup led by his former student, Odili, and another novel in which Ikem is assassinated under the regime of His Excellency in the fictional nation of Kangan. Besides A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah, he may be best known for three novels about the Christianization of the Igbo people. For 10 points, name this Nigerian creator of Okonkwo, the author of Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease and Things Fall Apart.
ANSWER: Chinua Achebe

I know there's a pretty steep difficulty jump from "The Flute/The Drum" to "Chief Nanga," but I liked using Achebe's short stories as lead-ins. Thoughts?
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by kdroge »

I guess the Zulu War question should have said "this war" instead of "this conflict," but aside from Zulu names the actual clues really couldn't point to any specific battle in the war (at least not any strong majority of them, I don't think).

The cases in the Mapp V. Ohio tossup probably should have been a bit later; I didn't realize they were that well-known at this point.

The Achebe tossup I can't really say since I left it fairly close to its original form and then someone else edited it. While I do think that it was a touch easily originally since some of those short stories have come up quite a bit, I feel like the yams is just a buzz point that people will know without any real knowledge more than anything else.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Gautam »

kdroge wrote:I guess the Zulu War question should have said "this war" instead of "this conflict," but aside from Zulu names the actual clues really couldn't point to any specific battle in the war (at least not any strong majority of them, I don't think).
It seemed to me that a preponderance of clues on military formations, and the fact that the question seemed to refer to one specific battle over and over again, led people to dismiss a war as a possible answer choice. I realize that "this conflict" more often refers to wars rather than battles, but sometimes we tend to make last minute calculations like the ones I stated above and blurt out a logical answer given the phrasing of the tossup.

EDIT:

I guess, for clarity's sake:

The aggressors in this conflict decided on a three-pronged plan of attack; their left flank, under the command of Evelyn Wood, decided not to engage the enemy after camping at Tinta's Kraal. Their right flank, which was led by Charles Pearson, fought a small battle near the Inyezane River and was besieged at Eshowe after they crossed the (*) Tugela River. The central units, commanded by Lord Chelmsford, failed to establish a defensive position and were decisively defeated, after which a smaller contingent of troops scored a major victory at Rorke's Drift. Ended by the Battle of Ulundi, this conflict had earlier seen a British defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana. For 10 points, name this war fought against a namesake African tribe led by Cetshwayo.
ANSWER: Anglo-Zulu War

The italicized portion doesn't seem to suggest that there was more than one battle. Did anyone else interpret it differently?
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

As soon as I heard "Evelyn Wood" I started running through battles of the Zulu War, because it sounded like you were describing a battle.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Yeah, sorry, the Achebe question was my bad: I intended to replace the short story titles with deeper clues from Arrow of God, but I underestimated the fame of "yams."
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Unicolored Jay »

gkandlikar wrote:Some things that have come up so far in the packets I've read at Minnesota practices:

* Weeks v US and Wolf v. Colorado are kind of stale clues that have increasingly been coming up as late-middle clues. Perhaps they shouldn't have been in the 2nd line.

* The tossup on the Zulu wars was a negbait for a battle from the Zulu wars (atleast 3 people I know did this, including my own teammate at the main site.)

* the tossup on PHP was really weak... It seemed to basically say "this is a server-side scripting language which had a recently released 4th verion" and we just played chicken out of disbelief.
Having just played this set, I can agree on all three of these. I was trying to think of a specific battle for the Zulu wars, then when I figured out that was all they wanted, I buzzed in near the end.

Also, I thought the solar wind tossup was rather transparent.

More to follow when I get the set so I can go back over and remember what was in it.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by Unicolored Jay »

Okay, a few more things.

The clue about Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky writing D minor violin concertos is incorrect; it's D major.

The clue "its spherical shape is said to be due to its own gravity" is kinda weird and probably redundant. (bonus on Saturn)

The Harold Pinter bonus seemed too easy to be in a finals packet.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by bmcke »

I think my least favourite was "Nathaniel Brandon" in the first few lines. I think my favourite was the tossup on Alexandrias. I will edit this post into a list of dislikes and favourite when I see all the questions eventually.
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Re: Weaker Questions

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Hey, is this set going to be posted soon?
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