Ganesh Nayak Prelims 2015

KQA Ganesh Nayak Memorial

Open QuizThe 26th edition

Prelims26 questions with 13 supps

11-20 starred

1.This Banaswadi-based business enterprise uses a logotype with a careful bit of angling. What is the angling meant to achieve/ suggest/remind you of?

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The Answer

The V is uterus/womb-shaped, and the O joins the V in a

manner that looks like ovary with oviduct/Fallopian tube.

One of these two gets full points.

Female reproductive system/cervix etc get half.

2.It is the smallest country in Africa both by area and by population. Their crest shows a long-lived species variant found on one of their territories. Identify the country, (and the species for bonus points).

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The Answer

Seychelles

SUPP1The Aldabra Giant Tortoise

Giant Tortoise gets ½

3.What does this map represent? What does the colour grey signify?

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The Answer

Writing systems/scripts of the worldSUPP2

Grey is Latin/Roman

4.His 1867 decision was received with derisive nicknames such as Walrussia and Icebergia. Who? What decision?

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The Answer

William Seward, Andrew Jackson’s Sec. of State

SUPP3The purchase of Alaska

5.Which Nobel laureate in Literature derives his surname from the practice seen here? Also, what metaphorical name is usually applied to what the men are doing?

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The Answer

Faulkner, from ‘falconer’SUPP4

Goose-stepping

6.Its title is explained in a 1316 letter to Cangrande della Scala with respect to content and style. The name was chosen since the poem develops from harsh and terrible events to a peaceful ending,and its style is intermediate between the high tragic style and the low elegiac one.

Name the poem. Who wrote the letter?

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The Answer

Commedia, later The Divine Comedy.SUPP5

Dante Alighieri

7.He was able to pursue risky long-term research, such as an innovative suspension system for cars, because he refuse to let his firm go public."I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money".

He taught for more than 45 years, and in 2011, donated a majority of his company’s shares to the school. While the gift provides them with annual cash dividends. they cannot sell the shares and do not participate in the company’s management.

Who? Full nameOR Which company?

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The Answer

Amar BoseOR

Bose Corporation

8.Daria Marchenko’s Face of War. Who is the subject of this artwork? How was it made—be specific?

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The Answer

Vladimir PutinSUPP6

Bullet shells used by Ukrainian separatists

9.His surname is often misspelt. It actually indicates Viennese origins, but often another surname meaning wheel-maker or winemaker is used. Which man of science and founder of a 20th century discipline?

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The Answer

Norbert Wiener, not Weiner

10.Often divided by medieval mapmakers, quite fancifully, into three regions: Petrea, or rocky, Deserta, or the desert and Felix, or the blessed, because myrrh and frankincense were found there. 19th century traveller Charles M Doughty borrowed one of these names for the book he wrote, Travels in _ _ _ _ _ _ Deserta, about his 1878 journey. Fill blank.

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The Answer

Arabia

11.What hashtag did Snickers add to this ad from June 2014?

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The Answer

12.Josef Koudelka did not dare publish many of the 5000 images he shot over one week till about two and a half decades later, in the 1990s, because he was afraid of reprisals against his family. This is perhaps one of the most popular of those images. In which city? What event?

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Prague, SUPP 7

The 1968 invasion.The watch records the exact

moment when Soviet tanks began to roll in.

13.“It is quite a sculptural design but free of ornamentation; the impressive bow-string girder-trusses that support the roof are responsible for its form and the well designed acoustics of the main space make it a very functional theatre”. Architecture scholar Rachel Lee commenting on a 1946 structure originally known as Victory Hall. The architect, who had found employment in India due to the good offices of his uncle, a Nobel laureate, used a concrete shell. This didn’t go down too well with the city’s elite, who were used to ornate granite constructions —so the response to the building was rather muted. How do we know it today? Who was the architect?

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The Answer

Bal Bhavan, Cubbon ParkSUPP8

Otto Konigsberger

14.A long-time journalist who worked for a string of Northern California newspapers landed an assignment in 1957 to write a story about a United States Department of Agriculture project to control spreading sand with European beach grasses on the coast of Oregon.

Surveying the encroachments from a low-flying aircraft, he became fascinated by the implications of this clash between human and nature. The project, he later wrote, “fed my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other—social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology.”

He chose its eventual title because of its onomatopoetic similarity to the word “doom.” He hoped his book would serve as an “ecological awareness handbook.

Who? What book?

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The Answer

Frank HerbertSUPP9Dune

15.It was originally built for the judo competition in the 1964 Summer Olympics, hence its name, rendered in English as Martial Arts Hall. We know it as an iconic venue for another kind of entertainment. What?

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The Answer

Nippon Budokan

16.This heir to a UK business fortune set up the grant-making body X to fund the arts and the sciences. While some may cavil at the name chosen, he offers this defence:

“It's a book about aspirations and visions. If you read page two you will realise it's nothing to do with wealth or the big parties that X gave, it's about the power of ideals and illusions. That is enormously important in life."

Who? What name did he choose?

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The Answer

David, Lord SainsburySUPP 9

The Gatsby Foundation

17.What 8-letter word forms the official Twitter Handle of Pope Francis? It derives from a function associated with the Tiber, and was once used by Julius Caesar. What function?

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The Answer

PontifexSUPP10

Maintaining the Tiber’s bridges

18.What spoof account on Twitter produced these gems? Identify the form?

Oh dear, I see gray!- Golden hair from cheap blue box -Quick trip to Walmart.

More hair products boughtThan buildings in NYC.There goes his money.

Is hairy-kirian inevitable actin twenty sixteen?

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Donald’s Hair Haikus

19.Somebody began an article on HuffPo with these words:

“My cat is my _ _ _, my eyebrows are #onbleak, and I rejoice when weekend plans are unexpectedly cancelled.”

The word blanked out is considered as a shortening of an existing shortening. Others gloss it as an acronym for person most important to one. What is the word? Also, some people use this hashtag as antonym to what expression popularised by a Black teenager through a vine?

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BaeBefore Anyone Else

SUPP11On fleek

20.Top: 2 Sept 2015. Bottom: 9 Sept 2015. What?

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Burning Man

21.What natural wonder does this fireplace by Italian designer Massimo Battaglia pay tribute to? Who produced it, inmyth?

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Giant’s CausewaySUPP 12

Finn McCool

22.One of several used for a particular purpose sixty years ago. This was sold for megabucks a few years ago. What purpose ?

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The Answer

The Roger Bannister sub-four-minute mile

23.Whose graduation photo, according to the Internet?

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24. One of the jurors for the Laureus award, showing off in 2005. Who?

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Nadia Comaneci

25.This distinctive hairdo has its own Twitter handle. Who/ What’s the Twitter handle called? Also, what 7-letter that Dubya could never pronounce right is normally prefixed to her surname to produce a bad-joke nickname?

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Anna Wintour/Anna Wintour’s Bob

SUPP13‘Nuclear’ Wintour

26.What slightly shady phone app launched a new version in 2013 that incorporated swipe navigation, double-tap replies, a revamped friend profile system, and a jokey reference to its distinctive mascot in the name chosen for this version, Banquo?

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The Answer

Snapchat