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Rounds
General Trivia - 1
General Trivia - 2
Science around us - 1
Visuals - I
Science around us - 2
Visuals - 2
Media and pop-culture
Rapid Fire
3. Rules
• 60 seconds for a direct question.
• 5 seconds for a passed question.
• 10 points for answering every direct
question
• 5 points for passed questions
• 90 seconds or 10 questions in Rapid Fire
round. No passes here. No negative
marking. 1 point per correct answer.
15. Q6. Unhappy with the hot-metal typesetting
machine used to publish his book “The Art of
Computer Programming” what did Donald Knuth
set out to invent in the 1970s?
18. Q1. This scientist was prosecuted for
homosexuality in 1952 in the UK. He accepted
treatment with female hormones over prison. He
died before his 42nd birthday from cyanide
poisoning. On 24th December 2013 the British
government gave him a posthumous pardon.
Name the scientist.
19. A. Alan Turing. The father of theoretical computer
science and artificial intelligence.
20. Q2. Leonardo of Pisa wrote a historic book on
arithmetic, Liber Abaci, which was among the first
western books to describe Hindu-Arabic numbers.
How do we better know him as?
22. Q3. In 1927 two American scientists working at Bell
Labs, while trying to study the atomic structure of
metals using low-speed electrons, ended up rather
accidentally confirming an idea proposed by a
French graduate student a few years before.
What idea was this?
23. A. The De Broglie hypothesis. These two were
Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer.
24. Q4. This mammal found in the Americas is often
used in the study of leprosy because it is one of the
few known species that can systematically contract
the disease due to its unusually low body
temperature. It is also used to make the back of a
charango - an Andean lute instrument.
Name the mammal.
26. Q5. Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of
Príncipe near Africa to watch the solar eclipse of 29
May 1919. During the eclipse, he took pictures of
the stars in the region around the Sun.
What was he trying to observe?
27. A. The deflection of light by the sun's gravitational field
as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
28. Q6. This spectacular phenomenon occurs when
charged particles originating from the
magnetosphere and solar wind are directed by the
earth’s magnetic field into the atmosphere.
Name the phenomenon.
31. Q1. Why do mangoes ripen faster when buried in rice
or kept covered in a paper bag?
32. A. Ripening fruits release ethylene, a plant hormone,
which also accelerates ripening. Rice (or the bag) traps
the gas and helps ripen the mangoes faster.
33. Q2. The consumption of what flavour enchancer
causes 'The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome'?
35. Q3. This fruit, referred to as the poison apple, was
considered poisonous in Europe in the late 1700s
because many Aristocrats would get sick and die after
eating it. What fruit are we referring to?
36. A. Tomatoes!
It wasn’t the tomatoes that were poisonous. The
aristocrats used pewter plates which contained lead.
The acidic juices of tomatoes would leach out the Pb
from the plates and into their bodies thereby causing
complications.
37. Q4. What is thermodynamically common to celery,
grapefruit, cabbage, lettuce and broccoli?
38. A. They are considered negative calorie food
apparently costing more energy to consume that they
yield when consumed.
39. Q5. Which condiment originally a strong smelling fish
sauce in China and Japan is commonly made out of
tomatoes all over the world?
46. Q. This is a very famous Scanning Tunneling
Microscope image of a corral of Fe atoms
decorated in a circular fashion on Cu surface.
Explain the ripples in the corral.
47. A. Wave forms in the surface electron density inside the
corral corresponding to a quantum state of a given
energy.
57. Q1. What is common to
Burgundy blood algae,
the dye 9-diethylamino-5-benzo[α]phenoxazinone
and Moses?
58. A. One of the 7 plagues of egypt - the Nile turning
blood red.
The algae is considered responsible for this effect.
The chemical is a dye called Nile Red.
And the third is, of course, the biblical conveyor of the
plague.
59. Q2. According to Hindu mythology, the asura Rahu
drank some amrit during the Samundra Manthan and
was ratted out to Vishnu by the sun and the moon.
Vishnu, in the form of Mohini, promptly cut off his head
before the amrit could reach his body. The vengeful
Rahu seeking his betrayers is supposed to cause what
astronomical events?
61. Q3. Consider the following quote from the Old
Testament : "And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten
cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all
about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round
about....And it was a hand breadth thick….". This
describes the molten sea that King Solomon had built
for the King of Kings. What did Solomon get wrong?
63. Q4. In greek mythology this character, a son of Zeus,
was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit
tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his
grasp, and the water always receding before he could
take a drink. This eternal punishment inspired the
name of which chemical element?
64. A. Tantalum. (Ekeberg wrote "This metal I call
tantalum ... partly in allusion to its incapacity, when
immersed in acid, to absorb any and be saturated.")
65. Q5. The plants, Selaginella bryopteris, occurring in the
Aravallis in Madhya Pradesh and Desmotrichum
fimbriatum, occurring in the Western Ghats, have been
shortlisted as candidates for what object from Hindu
mythology?
67. Q6. What sequence of events took place in Salem,
Massachusetts in 1692-93 due to an alleged case of
mass convulsive ergot poisoning caused by eating
infected rye bread?
73. A. Isolation of Fluorine
Gay Lusaac, Humphrey Davy and Paulin Louyet are
three of the “Flourine martyrs”.
Henri Mossain finally succeeded in isolating this
rather elusive element and bagged the 1906 Nobel
prize.
79. A. Tycho’s supernova SN 1572
Tycho Brahe
Tychonian system of the solar system
The recently observed supernova near M82.
Tycho Brahe also observed and recorded SN1572 a
supernova in Cassiopea also called Tycho’s
supernova.
81. A. The Lindbergh Operation
I - The Lindbergh operation, the first “trans-atlantic”
operation conducted using a robot
II - Charles Lindbergh, first “trans-atlantic” flight.
III - A shot from the movie “Robot”
83. A. The card game, Blackjack
1- The perfect hand in Blackjack
2 - The actor Jim Sturgess, from the movie “21”, which
depicted the escapades of the MIT Blackjack team
3 - Jeff Ma, one of the main members of the MIT Blackjack
team that used card counting to beat casinos consistently
through the 1980s and 90s.
85. Q1. This science-fiction movie draws inspiration from
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, which holds that the
true essence of an object is not what we perceive with
our senses but rather its quality and that most people
perceive only the shadow of the object.
Name the movie.
87. Q2. One of the scientific explanations offered as origin
of this myth is congenital porphyria (symptomized by
photosensitivity, reddish teeth) and also hypertrichosis
(excessive hair growth).
What is this myth?
