About the Book
Who made an enemy of two ladies through an apple? Why did Tar Baby keep on sayin' nothin'? Which royal residence is built on thirteen thousand piles? Following the best-selling book The World's Most Difficult Quiz comes this sequel which collects the most taxing questions from early King William's College General Knowledge papers published in the Guardian over many years. Again the book includes a new and devilishly difficult set of questions prepared especially for publication by quizmaster Pat Cullen. A challenge for the most erudite of minds, The World's Most Difficult Quiz 2 is the ultimate general knowledge challenge.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Questions
• 1920s
• 1930s
• 1940s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• 1970s
Answers
A Bespoke General Knowledge Paper
About the Author :
Dr Pat Cullen has set the King William’s College General Knowledge Papers since 1997.
Review :
A review of The World's Most Difficult Quiz. Arguably the most difficult set of questions in the world. A review of The World's Most Difficult Quiz. Devised for intellectual torture. From The Guardian's 'Paperback of the Week' review of The World's Most Difficult Quiz: This is the ultimate challenge of general knowledge, and to solve it involves not only a command of classical, historical and literary knowledge, but popular culture and contemporary events too, and, crucially, a freakish capacity for lateral thinking. When you see the answers, it will make you salute the setter's intelligence and resourcefulness, but there will also be something chilling about the sadism involved. Around this time last year I alerted readers to a collection of the General Knowledge Papers sat by the unfortunate pupils of King William's College on the Isle of Man. Regular Guardian readers will know that they, too, are invited to take this fiendish swine of a quiz around Christmas and then wait months before they find out the answers. As a commenter below the line pointed out last year, Wikipedia acknowledges the difficulty of the quiz thus: "a common score [is] just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are 40 to 50 for the unseen test and about 270 out of 360 for the second sitting." (I'm not sure about these figures, though, as the quiz is composed of 18 sections of 10 questions each.) The previous book contained all the quizzes from 1981 to 2011, during which period it had settled comfortably into its familiar format: each section asked you not just, explicitly, to answer the questions, but to work out what the theme of that section was in order to have a chance of answering them at all. So, for example, in the final section of this book (apart from a bespoke quiz at the end, with entrants at a small but significant risk of winning GBP1,000 of LUP books), you will have to work out, God knows how, what the connection is between a semi-precious fluorite, the recipient of "letters of termination from females", the landlord of The Spy-glass and the author of "Leaf by Niggle". (Among six other questions.) In latter years the quiz has evolved, under its current sadist - I mean setter - Dr Pat Cullen, to be as near Google-proof as possible. In volume two, a selection of quizzes from 1920-1980, you will find much more that can be worked out using the search engine; "perfidy" is Dr Cullen's term for such a tactic, and I must wholly concur with this. Then again, I would have to admit that I failed to identify a line from Tennyson's "The Voyage of Maeldune", and I am meant to know about such things. Was the poem, in 1927, such a likely item of mental furniture in a schoolboy's brain that it would not have been considered unreasonable to quote from it? But it's interesting to note, from the introduction, that in the early years after the quiz started in 1905 it "contained relatively simple questions, asked in a very direct and obvious manner". Yeah, right, I thought at first, that's easy for you to say, but then having a look at them I find that there are rather more easy questions than I recall from the earlier book. This would, presumably, be a matter of the sections not having cunningly hidden themes. But still: although the questions are recognisably KWC questions, there was a different frame of reference around in those days. The question in one quiz from 1936 - "7. Please?" (Yes, just the one word, but you can easily infer from the context that we are in the world of advertising slogans) - has, as its answer, "Players", ie the cigarettes. Another question leads us to Three Nuns tobacco, and another to Guinness. One suspects that similar general knowledge questions aimed at 13-year-olds today would not stray into such areas. There are fascinating resonances (I didn't know that "did you Maclean your teeth today?" is a slogan that dates back over 75 years), and at times the quiz reveals itself as a social history in miniature. Questions from 1936's first section are about royalty and their consorts (think: abdication); the theme of the opening section of 1939 is war; in 1940 the first questions, under the rubric "who said?" are: 1. Fight on? 2. Backs to the wall? 3. Situation excellent; j'attaque? And, naturally, the same part of the 1945 quiz asks us questions beginning "What Peace or Treaty ..." (Sample question: "should have deleted Mary's internal inscription?" Google that.) Dr Cullen is to be commended for reproducing these sections in their entirety, in the name of historical interest; and it's because of this that I might go so far as to say that this book is, actually, even more valuable and entertaining than its predecessor. Dr Cullen is to be commended for reproducing these sections in their entirety, in the name of historical interest; and it's because of this that I might go so far as to say that this book is, actually, even more valuable and entertaining than its predecessor.
