Academic WorldQuest

[FlamingPiWalrusWizard]

Hi. I was just wondering if any Quizbowl players could help out a fairly new team short on time hoping to win a local WorldQuest competition. Any strategies or study sources other than the study guide (which can be found here: http://www.worldaffairscouncils.org/ima ... 0Guide.pdf) would be excellent.
Advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

[at your pleasure]

I don't know if anyone here has experience with Academic WorldQuest. Could you perhaps post sample questions and/or clarify the game format?

[FlamingPiWalrusWizard]

This page: (http://www.worldaffairscouncils.org/mai ... ction=Main) can probably help you out more than I can, but I'll explain as best I can.
Basically, you sit at a table as a member of a 4-person team in a ballroom or other location where many other tables are containing other teams. At the head of the room, the master of ceremonies reads multiple choice questions aloud that are displayed on the wall by a projector. Each team has an answer sheet in front of them, and they fill in the bubbles accordingly. The questions cover ten areas of study defined by the study guide, including current events, world issues such as pandemics, and a spotlighted country (or two). The tests are 100 questions each, and the winners of each regional competition go to Washington D.C. for nationals with most of the expenses paid, I believe.

[at your pleasure]

What are the questions like?

[Kwang the Ninja]

My only advice for such a competition is what our NTAE coach told Team Florida before we played (basically)-- get questions right, but don't get questions wrong.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I did this last year. It doesn't involve buzzers and is more like a written exam where you confer with your teammates than anything else. As a result, the only things worth knowing for such a competition are the things in the study guide, so read it, run over it, memorize it, whatever you need to do. They will pick out dates, place names, and obscure sounding people above all else.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

I memorized every country's flag last year and that helped. Additionally, spending a lot of time with maps will do you well.

[GeneVan]

I played on a team at Minnesota's Worldquest this year and we did fairly well. I would recommend flags, capitals and reading the study guides for sure. Also there tend to be a few sports related questions especially about the olympics that tend to come up in our regionals, although I am pretty sure different regions have different questions so this may or may not apply.

[rchschem]

And don't look for good quizbowl standards. The judges don't care if the question was a hose or not. You'll get responses like "the players should know what we meant by the question."

But: memorize the book they put out and get to know what famous political Europeans look like.

[The Atom Strikes!]

I've done this a few times. Just read the things mentioned in their study guides. If you do that and keep abreast of current events (reading a respectable newspaper or the Economist will do this for you), you should have no trouble.