The Quizbowl Resource Center

JR beat me to it, but one of the mandatory history classes at Maggie Walker spends virtually all of the time before Christmas on China, so Deng gets a lot of play in that class (at least a full class period, maybe more, as I recall). Obviously, though, most schools will not cover him in any detail, ...

Are salt domes actually unique to Louisiana? I was pretty sure High Island, near Galveston, was a salt dome (although Texas was obviously not the answer to that question). Also, I happened to know about both the Atchafalaya Swamp and the Chandeleur Islands through birds, as the former was one of the...

I love the idea of this tournament, and I want to play it so badly.

I second the statement that reading the actual books/poems/plays is the best. I've noticed that if I don't reread a book, I forget a lot of the plot incidents within a year or two. However, writing a question a week or two upon reading the book helps cement it in my mind so I retain the memory of th...

At what point do we draw the line and say, "This is just something you should know."? I think knowing a variety of important religions is "just something you should know", which is an argument in favor of Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism, etc. This is why we see poor conversion...

I think the primary reason Rastafarianism would get better conversion than Jainism, to take your example (which I won't dispute) is that aspects of it have entered popular culture, while the same cannot be said of Jainism. However, just looking at the things you listed for why Rastafarianism is know...

For reference, these are the subdivisions I placed on the religion category for GSAC XVII. While much of GSAC was initially too hard, I think most of the religion was fine. There was a total of 12/12 religion. 1/1 Judaism 1/1 Islam 1/1 Catholicism/Orthodoxy 1/1 Protestantism 1/1 Biblical 1/1 Any Wes...

4. Also, trim geography down and/or put a much greater emphasis on world rivers/mountains/bodies of water in the geography category. I only have a problem with how many geography questions there are because of their content. I would much rather see a question on rivers/mountain ranges/bodies of wat...

What was the original rationale for having so much trash in college packets? Are there college teams that will stop playing if there's no trash to make NAQT accessible? That seems even less likely in college than in HS.

I don't really know how indicative this is of the rest of the country, but many lower-level teams in the Mid-Atlantic and specifically in the Richmond area come to whatever tournaments are available regardless of distribution or even difficulty. For example, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Championship at...

I'm thinking of teams who only play good quizbowl when it's NAQT Are these teams playing NAQT because they like the distribution, or because they are familiar with the NAQT name? I personally would not be surprised if many such teams would hardly mind minor distributional changes. NAQT doesn't need...

I won't be playing HS NAQT anymore, but I think NAQT should decrease geography and CE to whatever percentage is equivalent to 1/1 per round, and increase the arts and RMP. It might be interesting to try changing general knowledge into a Bruce Arthur-style Modern World category with more academic que...

I was very pleased with this set, particularly with history and geography. I will second (or third or fourth) that this was the best HSNCT I've heard. Incidentally, the reason I got the Kyrgyzstan TU so quickly was that it mentioned the city of Osh, which I knew from being good at geography, not cur...

I'm going to William and Mary next year.

Tucker only scored 40.

In fact, against Tucker Maggie Walker scored 325 points, and against Deep Run we scored 295 points.

I was very pleased with the quality of the questions.

The main problem I have with common links is that players can actually be penalized pointswise for not knowing early clues. In an ordinary tossup, since all the clues point to the same specific answer (Bismarck, Yeats, etc.), the only result of not knowing leadins is that you don't get the question ...

Toltecs is definitely the hardest part there.

Olmecs are definitely in the canon, more so than Toltecs, but neither of them are canon-pushers by any means.

At the very least, you might want to postpone this for a while until you've filled in all the distributional gaps.

Why is there no science, social science, or RMP? This. If you actually forgot three major categories, disregard the following. I don't like the idea of high school tournaments becoming vanity-type events, which is what this looks like. Several of the more important subjects are being left out, and ...

What Mike said about writing practice being linked with listening practice is very true. I started writing during my freshman year, and some of what I wrote for GSAC and HAVOC #I was really, really bad. Now, having heard more, I usually write much better. Also, related to your second question, if yo...

Deep duckweed knowledge should never be rewarded with TWENTYYYYYYYY. Are you maligning my deep duckweed knowledge? :wink: On a serious note, I think some of the geography in general was pretty variable in difficulty and quality of writing [the dams question, the above leadin, the (perceived by me) ...

As just an addendum to what Jack said, I found the mythology overwhelmingly Greek. Aside from toss-ups on Thor and Canopic Jars, I don't think there was any Norse or Egyptian (I'm probably forgetting something, but still...) I remember a bonus on Egyptian goddesses, several Celtic myth answers, a c...

It's been said before, but this set was bad. I haven't played any A-Sets this year, and the only other NAQT tournaments Gov has played were back in the fall, so I can't really compare the quality of specific sets. However, this set exuded a general feeling of badness beyond the norm for IS-sets. Bes...

I approve of bouncebacks because I think they allow teams with very deep knowledge in some areas but not in others to still be rewarded. Thus, they are useful even when the bonuses are of nearly the same difficulty. For example, a team with poor science knowledge could play an almost-equally-matched...

Poetry is something that you can read more of. If you don't have time during the school year to be constantly reading novels (like me), I would suggest this. There are lots of poets that get asked about, and it doesn't take too long to read lots of their works. Also, it would probably help you if y...

I still only have mediocre knowledge of Norse myth, but I will say that I had learned about Odin's ravens quite early from a children's Norse myth book I have. That book, which also had various stories including the one about Thor and Loki failing at the various contests like picking up the "ca...

A LOT of students learn about civil rights, political history, elections, explorers, and lots of other big topics that can/should be used likely more Yeah, in retrospect, I can't think of any civil rights at all (there were initially two civil rights bonuses on my answer list which I decided to rem...

As the History/Geo/Religion/SS editor, I should probably say what the subdistribution was for the history: 1/1 Ancient History (mostly Mediterranean) 1/1 European 1/1 American 1/1 World 1/1 Recent (overlaps slightly with some of the other categories) I decided that ancient history was something that...