Your starter for 10: can you match victorious Manchester's knowledge?
Published on 30 April 13
Back to back wins in University Challenge make Manchester the most successful team of the 21st Century
Following their emphatic 190-140 win over UCL in Monday's final, four Manchester students have picked up the University Challenge title - the second win for the University in as many years.
Linguistics student and team captain, Richard Gilbert, said: "It's very exciting, and we hope we've done the University proud.
“I think we did well because we had the perfect range of knowledge across the team, David is very strong on maths and science, I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, Debbie is great on biology and Adam’s a scientist, so we had a good mix of skills."
The win takes Manchester to four victories in eight years, an outstanding record equalled only by Magdalen College, Oxford.
Key to this consistency is University librarian Stephen Pearson, the man dubbed 'the Alex Ferguson of University Challenge'. His fastidious preparation - he has a collection of over 5000 questions including many from previous series of the quiz - means that team members are in the best possible position to achieve what is rapidly becoming almost expected success.
Are you destined for the next University Challenge winning team? Try these ten starter questions from Monday's final (answers here):1. One, you cannot win. Two, you cannot break even. Three, you cannot ... (buzz) 2. Add together the number of letters in the surnames of the prime minister who came to office after the 1945 general election and his two successors. What prime number results?
3. This picture contains some of the most frequently occurring words in the works of an English poet. What poet? 4. When read aloud, the three words meaning "island whose capital is Douglas", "units of digital information" and "common name of Canis lupus familiaris" form what improbable three-word headline? 5. Born in 1905, which Dutch American scientist gives his name to the region of the solar system that stretches from the ... (buzz) 6. Consisting of a structure of fibroin and surrounded by a matrix of sericin, what protein fibre is produced by the larvae of the insect which is ... (buzz) 7. Born in 1931, with which soviet leader are terms glasnost, meaning openness ... (buzz) 8. A state lottery draws three numbered balls from a selection of five. What is the probabability of guessing all three winning numbers?
Photograph: PA9. Look at the above picture of a prominent writer. What writer is this? 10. A contender for the unhyphenated word with the most occurrences of the letter B, what term indicates one who is "frivolous, flighty or excessively talkative"? 11. To give an idea of relative land area, the CIA world fact book points out that the United Kingdom is slightly smaller than which state in the western United States? |
