Getting started

Hey folks! I am here to take you to that part of the world where the mind is free and aspirations high. Guys, I am talking about the quizzing world. I will talk more about the origin and gradual development of quizzing in my subsequent posts. Today we will be engaged in what you have arrived for, quizzing. Here are some questions that will lighten up your mind and inspire you to get going. Here we go....

1. According to one legend, the Condessa de ____, wife of the Viceroy of Peru brought to Europe the
bark from which quinine was extracted after having herself benefited from its effects. In 1742,
Linnaeus named the tree in her honour. Researchers now believe that she never suffered from
malaria herself nor actually consumed the drug. Fill the blank or provide the name given by
Linnaeus.
1. Cinchon / Cinchona

2. What is travel writer Jonathan Raban describing in the lines that follow: “It begins in the mountains
of Turkey and ends in a brown bog at the neck of the Persian Gulf…it’s the town drain of Asia
Minor and one of the two oldest superhighways of the world. It is an Arab river with a Greek name,
meaning ‘of good fellowship’”?
2. Euphrates

3. What do Ernest Hemingway, Eric Linklater, Susan Ertz, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Beverley
Nichols, E. H. Young, Mary Webb, Compton Mackenzie and André Maurois have in common,
especially in connection with the year 1935?
3. First Ten Penguin Titles

4. Early in 2006, this director shot an ad for American Express featuring himself as restaurant patron
who looks on while strange things happen around him — such as a woman snaring a fly with her
tongue and fellow-diners disappearing like shattered glass. Who?
4. Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamalan

5. Atlantic Magazine sponsored French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy’s journey through America —
chronicled in the newly-released book American Vertigo. This was a retracing of another
Frenchman’s ramble through America (1831-32) which resulted in a famous book. The trip was
done in honour of the latter’s 200th birth anniversary. Name this famous Frenchman.
5. Alexis De Tocqueville[who wrote Democracy In America
]

6. This work was a tongue-in-cheek submission to a 1917 American art-show whose rules said
anything would be accepted. When the organizers rejected it, the artist responded with the words
“That is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”
Identify artist and work.
6. Marcel Duchamp & Fountain

7. The German term for punish was used a lot in their World War I propaganda posters against
England. It later became a verb in the English language meaning “to attack using an aircraft’s
machine-guns/cannons”. What term?
7. Strafe

8. This desert takes its name from the Uighur word for ‘labyrinth’ and is famous for its karaburan or
‘black sandstorms’. So feared were they that the ancient Silk Road actually forked at the eastern
edges of this desert so as to avoid them and joined up again on its Western periphery. The
Chinese nuclear-testing facility Lop Nor lies on its western edge. Identify.
8. Taklamakan / Taklimakan

9. Ossetra and Sevruga are two well-known varieties of this coveted culinary item which takes its
name from a Turkish word. The third and best-known variety takes its name from the Russian word
for ‘white’. Interestingly, this term is also applied to the white whale in these parts. Russia and Iran
dominate trade in this item. Name both the general term and the best-known variety.
9. Caviar and Beluga

10. In India, we tend to use this seven-letter word without the prefix motor, unlike in the West. English
dictionaries tend to define the word — as we use it — differently. It is glossed as ‘a child’s toy,
consisting of a long foot-board between two small end-wheels’ or as a ‘flat-bottomed sailboat with
runners for skimming over water or ice’. What word?
10. Scooter