Lord of the Rings

Transcript

Text from the slides — answers included, so no peeking if you're playing along!

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   Lord Of
   The Rings
   QM: Prayag Mohanty

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   upcoming quizzes/events

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   Clockwise Round
   12 questions
   +10/0 for bounce
   +10/-5 for pounce
   Provide the complete answer for full points, on pounce
   Split scoring applicable, on bounce
   QM discretion is final
   Shoutout to Divyanshu & Ishan for GPing

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   1.
   In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin divided the world's social cultures into
   two types.
   _____ (5) cultures tend to be soft and friendly on the surface, even with
   strangers, but have a hard protective inner core.
   _______ (7) cultures present a tough shell to the world, resisting closeness
   and small talk, but reward patience with a softness within.
   Both types are named after the fruits whose physical structure mirrors
   these social architectures exactly.
   What is the model called?

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   safety slide

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   Peach and Coconut

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   2.
   At the Miami Art Museum, an interactive installation reimagines an indoor
   Olympic sport, where it’s net is replaced by a body of water. Players are
   warned not to reach in to retrieve balls that fall in, and not to continue
   playing with a wet ball if one does.
   What is the punny, onomatopoeic title of this installation?

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   safety slide

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   Ping Pond Table

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    3.
    In 1859, the Lyon chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin patented an aniline
    dye and named it after a flower [X]. This pendulous flower, discovered in
    the 1700s in Central and South America, was named after a German
    botanist, Leonard _____.
    Later that same year, Napoleon III's French forces beat the Austrians in
    the Battle of [Y]. Verguin's employer hastily renamed the dye after the
    town in Lombardy, where the battle was fought.
    Both names survived. [Y] dominated the 20th century and became a
    standard printing ink. [X] became trendy around the 2000s. Not to blush,
    but the dye featured significantly in a recent global event.
    Give [X] and [Y] essentially the same color.
    (Pic follows)

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    (picture slide)

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    safety slide

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    Fuchsia Pink, Magenta

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    4.
    When the Germans started using chlorine gas in WW1, the Allied soldiers
    found themselves in a dire situation. Knowing that ammonia could
    neutralize chlorine, they resorted to breathing through rags soaked in
    something, out of desperation.
    What naturally occurring elixir, did they soak the rags into?
    Soon, the Allied scientists experimented with materials that could trap
    poison gases. They discovered that the remnant of a common ingredient,
    when burnt, created a dense porous structure, which trapped the gas
    molecules before they reached the lungs.
    What commercial food item? The resulting product is a popular
    ingredient in the cosmetic industry.

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    safety slide

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    Urine; Coconut Shells/ Activated Charcoal

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    5.
    Surendra Mohan Bose was an Indian scientist who was imprisoned during
    WW1. While in jail, Bose came across accounts of Indian soldiers
    operating in difficult weather conditions, while imported products of this
    type remained expensive and largely inaccessible to ordinary Indians.
    His breakthrough came from an unlikely source, ducks. He observed how
    water effortlessly rolled off the duck’s feathers because of the natural
    oils covering them and started a brand on this unique waterproof
    technique.
    Name the eponymous brand? (nostalgic to a few)

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    safety slide

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    Duckback
    The phrase "like water off a duck's back" inspired the brand name

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    6.
    Through the 1700s, the dominant coin in the Atlantic world was the
    Spanish silver dollar, written in ledgers as pesos. Clerks abbreviated it
    "PS".
    In fast handwriting, the s got written small and raised above the P - Pˢ.
    Over time, the two letters collapsed into each other and the loop of the P
    dropped away.
    This led to current day version of which symbol?

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    safety slide

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    Dollar Sign $

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    7.
    This was originally used for visual-spatial measurements while driving. It
    was also a way to differentiate between different manufacturers.
    The luxury manufacturers transformed it from a vestigial to an aesthetic
    accessory, reflective of their brand identity. Despite the advent of sensors
    and other technology, this feature still remains in demand.
    In India, the government has repurposed this feature to project its
    commanding presence.
    What feature? How has the govt. repurposed it into?

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    safety slide

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    Hood ornament, Flag/Spike

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    8.
    What is the significance of a Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville owned by
    William Carter of Pennsylvania?
    The 36-year-old Carter, wealthy heir to a coal & iron fortune, purchased
    the Renault while traveling from Europe with his wife and two children.

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    safety slide

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    The car from RMS Titanic
    Which also inspired THAT scene ;)

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    9.
    On 22 November 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis
    Lakers 19–18 (the lowest-scoring game in NBA history) by simply holding
    the ball and refusing to shoot. Attendance was spiraling.
    Danny Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals (now Philadelphia
    76ers), reckoned a watchable game contained about 120 field-goal
    attempts across 48 minutes. He did the maths and found a number. The
    league adopted his answer for the 1954–55 season and scoring rose by
    roughly fourteen points a game in a single year.
    What did Biasone's number give the sport?

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    safety slide

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    Shot clock / 24 second clock

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    10.
    According to Aristotle, the brain was merely a cooling radiator for the
    blood while the true seat of memory & intelligence lay in a different yet
    more important organ.
    His theory dominated European thought well into the Middle Ages, which
    is why medieval students committing texts to memory believed they were
    filing them in an organ that had nothing to do with it.
    Which phrase, still used in schools, is a remnant of this misconception?

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    safety slide

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    Learn by heart

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    11.
    New Zealand sports teams have an interesting naming scheme for their
    respective sports. Identify the missing ones.
    Cricket: Black Caps
    Rugby: All Blacks
    Basketball: ? (physical trait of most of its players)
    Badminton: ? (dropped in 2024 due to its NSFW nature)
    Lawn bowls: ? (also a casino card game)
    Lawn bowling is a sport in which players try to roll their ball as close as
    possible to a smaller jackball. The balls follow a curved path when being
    rolled.

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    safety slide

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    Tall Blacks; Black Cocks; Black Jacks

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    12.
    Goregaon Sports Club
    Parsi Dairy Farm
    Nino's Burger
    Poornima Restaurant
    Shalimar Hospitality
    Aparna Juhu Gymkhana
    Ajanta Caterers
    Maroosh
    Non-exhaustive list of what?
    Which famous Powai establishment is missing (need specific)?

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    safety slide

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    Licenses suspended by FDA

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    H1 & H3 hostel mess of IITB

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    Written Round
    Identify the songs based on their YT comments
    6 Questions
    +10/0 for each answer

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    1.

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    2.

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    3.

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    4.

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    5.

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    6.

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    exchange sheets

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    1.

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    Wonderwall by Oasis

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    2.

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    Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    3.

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    Sunflower by Post Malone, Swae Lee

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    4.

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    Gaddi Red Challenger by Babbu

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    5.

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    Why This Kolaveri Di

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    6.

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    Brown Rang by Yo Yo Honey Singh

    ▶ Video (YouTube) — play it in the viewer

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    Anti Clockwise Round
    12 questions
    +10/0 for bounce
    +10/-5 for pounce
    Provide the complete answer for full points, on pounce
    Split scoring applicable, on bounce
    QM discretion is final

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    1.
    A famous tourist spot in India is named for the convergence of four
    creeks. This spot has become iconic for a kind of street food.
    What is this place, which is slowly becoming a genericized word for any
    market thronged with food stalls in other cities in Central and Western
    India?

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    safety slide

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    Chowpatty

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    2.
    When you go to [X].com, you are greeted by a prominent image (top pic).
    This website is currently managed by a company run by AI influencers.
    If you visit [Y].com, you are redirected to the home page of a learning
    company that was owned by Pearson until 2020 and if you visit [Z].com
    you land on a website (bottom pic) owned by a Dallas HQ company.
    Give X, Y and Z; the three terms are related. All of you have encountered
    it for at least a few years, at some point in your lives.
    (Pic follows)

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    (picture slide)

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    safety slide

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    X - Physics, Y - Biology, Z - Chemistry

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    3.
    In 2016, Canadian chef Kelvin Cheung opened a nautically themed
    seafood restaurant in Mumbai. It became the default Bollywood A-list
    hotspot almost immediately and later spawned many branches.
    The name of this restaurant chain is inspired by a talking crab from the
    1989 Disney animated film The Little Mermaid.
    Identify this brand.

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    safety slide

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    Bastian, from Sebastian

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    4.
    First instance of?

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    safety slide

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    First-ever instance of CT scan

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    5.
    In August 2026, Hindustan Times ran a column on India's elderly
    struggling with OTPs and UPI. The headline was a pun on an American
    metal band's name, which also described how elders are coping with the
    complexities of automation and digital systems.
    Give me the headline

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    safety slide

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    Age against the machine

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    6.
    Introduced in the Victorian era, this physical feature was present in the
    flagship products of the Big Four, helping people navigate their contents
    rather than fully peruse them. From the 20th century, as these products
    moved online, the feature became almost obsolete.
    In 2025, in its first revision in 22 years, one of the Big 4 (the only
    American one) insisted on retaining the obsolete physical feature purely
    out of nostalgia. The only US machine capable of doing them had shut
    down since it was last needed, so the work had to go to India.
    What feature?

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    safety slide

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    Thumb notches on dictionaries

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    7.
    Bhramari, is a form of Shakti who
    is worshipped beside the
    Jyotirlinga at Srisailam.
    Her name is also given to a
    pranayama performed with a low
    humming exhalation.
    Who is she considered the
    goddess of?

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    safety slide

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    Bees

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    8.
    Until 1975, this Southeast Asian kingdom flew a red flag bearing a three-
    headed white elephant beneath a nine-tiered umbrella.
    Maha Sila Viravong, a scholar of literature and history, was asked in 1945
    to produce something distinct from the royal standard. He took his cue
    from a neighboring country’s tricolor, which had displaced that country's
    own white-elephant flag.
    Identify the country [3]
    Which mythological creature does the former flag represent? [3]
    What does the blue band in the center of the present flag represent?
    [4]
    (Pic follows)

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    (picture slide)

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    safety slide

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    Laos; Airavat; Mekong river

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    9.
    In post-WWII Soviet Russia, Stalin’s government banned Western music,
    leaving fans desperate for alternatives. With this restriction and vinyl
    unobtainable, a sound engineer named Ruslan Bogoslovsky built a copy
    of a recording lathe and started pressing bootlegs onto the flexible plastic
    sheets available in bulk for free from hospital waste. The results were
    single-sided, played at 78 rpm, wore out after a few dozen plays, and had
    their spindle holes burned through with a lit cigarette.
    They carried jazz, rock and roll, tango and were sold hand to hand at flea
    markets. Over a million records were circulated.
    Because of what they were cut on, buyers could see ribs, skulls and
    shattered pelvises through the grooves, which gave the records their
    popular name.
    What were they made from and what were they called? [5+5]

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    safety slide

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    Discarded X-ray films; known as bone music or "ribs" (rebra)

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    10.
    A blazar is a supermassive black hole shooting out a jet of plasma at
    almost light speed. One of them, PKS 1424+240, was among the
    brightest gamma-ray and neutrino sources in the sky, yet its jet seemed
    to move slowly. After 15 years of research, astronomers at the Max
    Planck Institute found the jet is aimed almost perfectly at Earth. The
    slowness is a projection effect and the direct view boosts its apparent
    brightness.
    The nickname for this blazar comes from a mid-20th-century work of
    fiction that features a fiery, dangerous watcher whose gaze can only be
    turned in one direction at a time.
    What nickname/ fictional character?
    (Pic follows)

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    (picture slide)

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    safety slide

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    Eye of Sauron

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    11.
    The €500 is the highest-value euro banknote.
    It was nicknamed the ___ _____ because everyone knew it existed but
    nobody ever saw one. The ECB stopped issuing it in 2019 precisely
    because its main users were criminals.
    FITB

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    safety slide

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    Bin Laden

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    12.
    This building is an octagon with no prayer hall. At its center is not a floor
    but a bare outcrop of exposed bedrock.
    The mosaics carry some of the earliest dated Quranic inscriptions
    anywhere in the world. One band, over the inner arcade, is addressed
    directly to Christians, warning them not to say "Three."
    The Crusaders turned it into a church, faced the rock in marble and cut
    Latin texts over the Arabic. Salahuddin stripped all of that out after 1187.
    What building is this?
    (Pic follows)

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     (picture slide)

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     safety slide

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     Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra), Jerusalem

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     ty!