Cerebrum 3.0 Prelims QM: Mahendra Mohan Das
Cerebrum 3.0 Prelims
QM: Mahendra Mohan Das
Universal rules for the quiz:
• Quizmaster is God. And he doesn’t play dice
(used to play when he was a child).
• Hints will be given like charity. But the same
cannot be said about time. He has a train to
catch. Plan accordingly.
• Arguing with a sleep-deprived quizmaster is
injurious to health. “Janhit mein jaari”.
Rules for prelims
• 25 questions. No negatives. I love guesses.
• 16-20 are starred questions, to resolve ties.
• Using electronic devices (or printed or hand-
written notes, too, to be clear) will lead to
immediate disqualification. And yes, keep
cellphones in silent mode.
1)
• The Bombay Natural History Society, founded
on 15 September 1883, is one of the largest
NGOs in India engaged in conservation and
biodiversity research. The BNHS logo is a bird
named William, who lived on the premises of
the Society from 1894 until 1920.
• This bird is more famous among the people of
North-East India for something that takes place
in Nagaland in the first week of December
every year.
• Which bird?
Hornbill.
2)
• The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)'s one-
off digital theatre project (a variation of the
name of a Shakespearean play ____ ____ ____
____) took place live in Stratford-upon-Avon and
online, in collaboration with Google from 21st-
24th June, 2013.
• Which play? And why 21st June?
• (Screenshot on the next slide)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
• 21st June: Midsummer.
• Longest day of the year.
• The production was Midsummer Night’s
Dreaming.
3)
• Humphry Davy is best remembered today for
his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline
earth metals, as well as contributions to the
discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine
and iodine; as well as the inventor of the Davy
lamp, a variant of the safety lamp.
• He, however, is supposed to have claimed
“something” else as his greatest discovery.
• “What”?
Michael Faraday.
• Faraday sent Davy a three-hundred-page book
based on notes that he had taken during the
lectures of Davy. Davy's reply was immediate,
kind, and favourable; and later appointed
Faraday as his secretary.
4) • Her father studied her horoscope and predicted
that she would remain and unmarried. To avoid
this fate, he ascertained an auspicious moment
for his daughter's wedding and to alert his
daughter at the correct time, he placed a cup
with a small hole at the bottom of a vessel filled
with water, arranged so that the cup would sink
at the beginning of the propitious hour.
• He put the device in a room with a warning to
her to not go near it. In her curiosity though, she
went to look at the device and a pearl from her
bridal dress accidentally dropped into it, thus
upsetting it. The auspicious moment for the
wedding thus passed unnoticed leaving a
devastated father.
• Who was she? Who was her father? Or, how was
she immortalized by her father?
Lilavati.
5)
• Ouroboros is an ancient
symbol depicting a
serpent or dragon
eating its own tail.
• What was inspired by a
dream a certain
individual had figuring a
similar creature? Who
was the person?
Kekulé.
• The structure of the benzene ring.
6)
• Upon arriving at Princeton, this person was
invited to Dean Eisenhart’s office. The dean’s
wife greeted him and offered him a cup of tea.
The following dialogue ensued:
• Dean’s wife: “Would you like cream or lemon in
your tea, Mr. _____?”
• He replied (without thinking): “I’ll have both,
thank you.”
• What did the lady famously reply?
7)
• Established in 1959 and
beginning operations
in 1968, it is Ecuador's
first national park and
a UNESCO World
Heritage Site (whose
logo is shown in the
picture); and has
many famous visiting
sites, including Tortuga
Bay.
• Name it.
Galapagos national park.
8)
• What is being
celebrated? Give
the exact term for
full points, or the
funda for half
points.
Newtonmas.
• Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday.
9)
• According to Google Calculator, “___ ___ ___" is
equal to 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz. The hertz is a
unit of frequency (one per second), and thus if
the mean length of time between ____ ____
(2.7145 years according to Google) is
metricated and converted to a frequency (by
calculating the multiplicative inverse), it can be
expressed in terms of hertz.
• Explanation of which English phrase?
Once in a blue moon.
10)
• First produced in 1935, by Wallace Carothers at
DuPont Experimental Station, it is one of the most
commonly used polymers. Many individuals and
corporations worked diligently during the first few
months of World War II to find a way to replace
Asian silk by it in parachutes. In 1940, John W.
Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the first letters of
the name were arbitrary and the last two letters
were copied from the suffixes of other fibers; and
the name has nothing to do with two city names
as many of us have read in our childhood.
• What?
Nylon.
• No, it’s not abbreviation of New York and
London.
11)
• In chaos theory, the _____ effect is the sensitive
dependency on initial conditions in which a
small change at one place in a deterministic
nonlinear system can result in large differences
in a later state. The name of the effect, coined
by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the
theoretical example of a hurricane's formation
being contingent on whether or not a distant
_____ had flapped its wings several weeks
earlier.
• What is the effect called?
The butterfly effect.
12)
• “I trust, you remember me as a fellow-traveller
on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very
much recall at this moment your views on the
growth of the ascetic spirit in India... I recall
these ideas in connection with my scheme of
Research Institute of Science for India, of which
you have doubtless heard or read…”
• This is a part of a letter written by X to Y, after
which, Y endorsed the project, and Z was set
up.
• Solve the variables.
• X: Jamsetji Tata
• Y: Swami Vivekananda
• Z: Indian Institute of Science
13)
• This is the trailer of Heartless, a 2014 Hindi movie
released a few weeks ago. The directorial
debut of Shekhar Suman got average ratings
by various newspapers and magazines. Which
medical condition is this film based on?
Anesthesia awareness.
14)
• The animal XY, despite their common name,
are neither in the Y family, nor are they from X,
being a famous example of misnomers.
• These animals played a major role in the
establishment of germ theory in the late 19th
century, through the experiments of Louis
Pasteur, Émile Roux, and Robert Koch. They
have also been launched into orbital space-
flight several times, first by the USSR on the
Sputnik 9 biosatellite of March 9, 1961 – with a
successful recovery.
• Which animal?
Guinea pig.
15) • This is an example of an anechoric chamber.
Situated at Orfield Laboratories, Minnesota, USA,
what record does this room hold?
World’s most silent room.
16) What is this a list of? Also, FITB.
Most no. of patents.
17) • In 1909, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
• “I came in with ____ in 1835. It is coming again
next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will
be the greatest disappointment of my life if I
don't go out with ____. The Almighty has said, no
doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable
freaks; they came in together, they must go out
together.”
• His prediction was accurate; Twain died of a
heart attack on April 21, 1910.
• What was he talking about?
Halley’s comet.
18)
• Discovery of Ta(2) has a famous story. These
numbers are called ____ numbers, owing to the
fact that the one of the persons involved with
Ta(2) saw the number on a ____ and reported it
to the other person. The subsequent ____
numbers were found with the help of
computers.
• What are they called? FITB.
• Also, give Ta(2).
• (picture on the next slide)
Taxicab numbers; 1729.
• As told by Hardy about the Hardy-Ramanujan
number:
• I remember once going to see him when he
was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab
No. 1729, and remarked that the number
seemed to be rather a dull one, and that I
hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No”,
he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is
the smallest number expressible as the sum of
two [positive] cubes in two different ways.”
19) Connect.
Same genus and species name.
• Lynx lynx.
• Bison bison.
• Gorilla gorilla.
• Hyena hyena.
• Indicator indicator.
• Iguana iguana.
20) • The distance between the earth and sun is __
times the sun’s diameter. The distance between
the earth and the moon is __ times the moon’s
diameter. The diameter of the sun is __ times the
diameter of the earth.
• In ayurvedic practice, it is believed that the
body has __ pressure points where consciousness
and flesh intersect to create life.
• These are two of the many explanations given
by __rockstarguitars.com about why they chose
this particular number.
• Which number is being talked about?
• Hint: in Assam (and many other states), this
number is now more famous for something else.
108.
21) • Connect the
cities to an
institute.
• The structures
will be identified
(except the last
one) as a hint, if
everyone
agrees.
Indian Statistical Institute.
22) • Designed by NASA, where is this spacesuit
inspired from?
Buzz Lightyear.
23) • Who designed the structure of Montreal
Biosphere? (bigger picture next slide)
Buckminster Fuller.
24)
• Elise Andrew is a British blogger, social media
specialist, science communicator, and a
webmaster. She founded something over
Facebook just for fun, which immensely became
very popular and resulted in her being called
“the Neil deGrasse Tyson of Facebook”. It was
then expanded and went on to be a website
and now also has a merchandise site.
• What did she found?
I Fucking Love Science!
25)
• After his most famous discovery, he was
confident of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics,
but was disappointed when the Nobel Prize
went to Richardson that year and to de Broglie
the next year. He was so confident of winning
the prize the next year that he booked tickets in
July, even though the awards were to be
announced in November, and would scan
each day's newspaper for announcement of
the prize, tossing it away if it did not carry the
news. He did eventually win that year’s Nobel
Prize in Physics.
• Who?
C V Raman.
Finals starting in half an hour***
***Terms and conditions applied.
• See you in the finals. It’s going to be legen… wait for
it… dary!