*General Knowledge and General Fallout*

If my general workload doesn't lighten up anytime soon, and it shows no signs of lessening, I might to start declaring more lazy blog and no-blogging days. And of course that would spoilt my chances of getting nation (if not international recognition) of my blog, followed by product placements and endorsements and an invitation to write for The Economist. *Snort* yeah right...

Anyway, the NUS Student's Political Association is running a general knowledge cum current affairs quiz, of which yesterday was the preliminary round consisting of 35 MCQ and 15 short answer questions. To be honest, it wasn't particular hard nor was it utterly easy, mostly because my knowledge of the hard science is quite dismal and I have little head for numbers. Anyway, I have great faith in my teammates, Chew Lin and David a.k.a. Singapore's Second Brainiest Scholar and hopefully we'll learn that we make it to the finals on Tuesday.

But moving on with the story, one thing or anothe led me to recount a story which involved me setting such a quiz for the incoming batch of J1 debaters which included luminaries such as the entire first team of ACS(I) as well as speaking members of top schools like RI, MGS etc. It wasn't a fiendishly hard quiz in my opinion but its focus was heavily exclusive on geo-politics, current affairs and history i.e. stuff that you require as the basis of a successful debating career. It included questions like what and when was the Uruquay Round and what the heck was the Banana Wars about. The top score eventually went to Dennis Yeo of ACS(I) of about 68%.

Anyway, this got me and Her talking about creating a new test (because my computer had been hit twice by hard disk failure and a virus leading to a massive loss of data) and over dessert we did.

A sample question (first one with the correct answer gets a cup of tea from me): Rude without the R. Explain the significance of this person's theories to the issue of property rights. Bonus points for linking it to the Environmental Movement.

Peace!