Friday, February 29, 2008

If you ever happen to be running a trivia night somewhere, and for a couple of your questions, you'd like your contestants to translate foreign phrases, here's a tip: make sure your caller can actually pronounce said phrases, or at least spell them for the audience. Amour and mort sound a bit alike in French, but there's quite a bit of difference in meaning there.

1. Which U.S. President actually named the White House "The White House?"
2. What is the tallest mountain in Europe?
3. What is the most common element in the human body?
4. Within 100 lbs., how big was the largest measured pumpkin in the world?

3 comments:

bill said...

a. Andrew Jackson - wrong.
b. my guess was so wrong I'm not bothering to record it. Despite subscribing to Outside magazine for more than a decade, I only know the name of one European mountain.
c. since we're dirty bags of water, i'm going with oxygen.
d. 1000>x<2000? Or greater than a ton? My guess = 1800 lbs. close...according to wiki, my range missed by 11 lbs.

answers for the last two weeks, not so good.

J. Bowman said...

I'm going by the answers given by the caller. I have not verified their accuracy.

1. Theodore Roosevelt
2. Mt. Elbrus. Oddly, they gave us a multiple-choice question for this. Before we found out that our choice was incorrect, I commented that it was a good thing they gave us choices, because my guess would have been the Matterhorn (which was not one of our options).
3. Oxygen it is. Hydrogen was also accepted; apparently, if almost all the teams give the same wrong answer, it is counted as correct.
4. We were told 1385 lbs.

bill said...

I was also thinking Matterhorn.

They need to update their pumpkin information