2021 ACF Fall - Specific Question Discussion

[katherine]

Specific questions and errata from 2021 ACF Fall can be discussed here. I have incorporated feedback from the sites and the packets can be found here.

[db0wman]

There were two bonus easy parts with the answerline "banana" in packets A and C (which went poorly at my site since we skipped packet B). One of the parts played comically easily by giving "peelable yellow fruit" while the other proved difficult for several rooms, only giving "____ Republic".

Overall, it would've been nice if the set had been a little bit easier, but I understand that it's difficult to produce a playable set for both complete novices and experienced high school players transitioning to the college game.

[Fado Alexandrino]

The bonus on Battle of Lake Erie that also accepts Put-In-Bay mentions Put-In-Bay in the question.

The tossup on magnetic fields that accepts nuclear magnetic resonance imaging should have an answerline directive on "NMR"

The tossup on David Foster Wallace should have an answerline directive on "DFW"

The figure skating bonus where they asked for this country as a hard part name drops someone named "Guillaume", which makes it decidedly not hard.

[VelarApproximant]

The figure skating bonus where they asked for this country as a hard part name drops someone named "Guillaume", which makes it decidedly not hard.

Hilariously, my team and I heard "Papadakis" and answered "Greece."

[Bhagwan Shammbhagwan]

The Bill Clinton bonus part mentions Brady Bill in the lead-in and has Brady Bill as an answer.

[meebles127]

The Bill Clinton bonus part mentions Brady Bill in the lead-in and has Brady Bill as an answer.

As someone who only staffed this tournament, this is my only real complaint.

Otherwise, there were several questions I found really enjoyable, which I'll enumerate sometime this week.

[hiraeth]

I thought it was an interesting choice to have packet L's bonus 20 include a part about aliyah after packet A's had defined it in bonus 8.

[L.H.O.O.Q.]

The figure skating bonus where they asked for this country as a hard part name drops someone named "Guillaume", which makes it decidedly not hard.

[H] Surya Bonaly is a Black figure skater from this country. Guillaume Cizeron and Gabriella Papadakis, who hold numerous all-time records in ice dancing, are a team representing this country.
ANSWER: France [accept the French Republic or République française]

I had meant to search more meaningfully for a hard part to this bonus. I had thought that maybe people's ling-fraud sensors would be thrown off by the name "Gabriella Papadakis." For what it's worth, the experienced quizbowlers who were writing, editing, and playtesting the questions seemed to indicate that this part was tough to fraud.

However, as the hard part of the bonus, this was intended to demand non-trivial knowledge on figure skating. It's not a part I should have made guessable in the first place. I think there's an argument to be made here that the fraudability of this part ruins the integrity of the entire bonus, but in the interest of sticking to what's relevant: sorry for the poor judgment there. Hopefully it didn't have any meaningful impact on any players' experience playing the questions.

[a bird]

[E] The "omega" in the expression for the quantum harmonic oscillator's Hamiltonian represents this quantity, which
equals two pi over the period of oscillation. This quantity is measured in hertz.
ANSWER: angular frequency

This is a very minor point, but hopefully it will clear up confusion for someone. Hertz (Hz, cycles per second) is the SI unit of (ordinary) frequency (symbolized f or nu), not angular frequency (symbolized omega), which is measured in inverse seconds (implicitly radians per second). While these both have dimensions of 1/time, they're not the same unit because they differ by 2 pi: omega = 2pi f.

This is why Planck's constant is sometimes written with units of J/Hz, while hbar (the reduced Planck constant: h/2pi) has units of J s. The energy of a photon can equivalently be written E = h f or E = hbar omega.