Way back on Christmas Eve I posted a link to this year’s King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2024-25.
As always it was obscure and fiendishly hard.
Today the Guardian have published the answers.
I’ve not yet totted up exactly how well I didn’t do, but I doubt I have more than a handful of correct answers! Did anyone manage to get into double figures without internet searches?
As is traditional, once again we bring you this year’s King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2024-25.
For over a century the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper. The pupils sit the test twice: once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year – after spending the holiday researching the answers. The test used to be mandatory but these days participation is voluntary.
The quiz is well known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are around 12% for the unseen test and about 70% for the second attempt – and of course the average scores are going to be very much lower than this.
The quiz is always introduced with the Latin motto Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est, “To know where you can find anything is, after all, the greatest part of erudition” – something my father always impressed on me as “Education is not knowing, it is knowing where to find out”.
You can find this year’s GKP on the King William’s College website at https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/GKP_2024_25.pdf.
I’ve not yet tried this year’s test myself, but unseen I don’t normally have many more clues that the KWC pupils!
Enjoy your Christmas!
Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.
Christmas
Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2023.
Each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.
Christmas
Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.
As is traditional, once again we bring you this year’s King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2023-24.
For over a century the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper. The pupils sit the test twice: once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year – after spending the holiday researching the answers. The test used to be mandatory but these days participation is voluntary.
The quiz is well known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are around 12% for the unseen test and about 70% for the second attempt – and of course the average scores are going to be very much lower than this.
The quiz is always introduced with the Latin motto Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est, “To know where you can find anything is, after all, the greatest part of erudition” – something my father always impressed on me as “Education is not knowing, it is knowing where to find out”.
You can find this year’s GKP on the King William’s College website at https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/General-Knowledge-Paper-2023-2024-Questions.pdf.
I’ve not yet tried this year’s test myself, but unseen I don’t normally have many more clues that the KWC pupils!
Enjoy your Christmas!
Royal Mail have released this year’s Christmas stamps, and yet again we’ve managed to create a perfectly horrible, ever more nauseatingly religious, set of designs – which isn’t helped by this ubiquitous barcode.
Royal Mail had (at least until recently) a policy of alternating religious and secular themes year-by-year. This seems to have gone by the board as the last five years’ designs have all been religious.
Yes, I know Christmas is supposed to be a religious festival, and this is a nominally Christian country. However it would be really good to (a) have some stamps celebrating the pagan Yule – or Roman Saturnalia which provided much of the Christian festivity – and (b) some decent, simple designs.
We’ve had special Christmas stamps every year since 1966 (thanks to the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, whose idea it was). But to my mind there have been few really good designs. From all the years, perhaps the one I like best – for their clean simplicity – are the ones from 1980.
With 1969, 1973 and 1993 following on (not necessarily in that order).
As for the rest, they span the range from merely OK to abominably awful.
Not that other countries’ stamps are necessarily any better, although many are.