Analysis: Season 1, Game-week 5
Researching about a matter while writing a small question, often sends us down a rabbit hole of interrelated information. That’s exactly what happened to me while writing the Areography quad for game-week 5. It was a great opportunity for me to learn the history of the mapping of Mars, as well the topography of Mars. A lot of it was completely new information for me (or as we all love to call it - TIL (Today I Learnt)). Game-week 5 was a fun set to create, especially the quads like Areography and Flowers in Bollywood. We hope that you enjoyed them too.
In game-week 5, we have decided to shake things up a bit, and have introduced what I would like to call ‘the Himalayan Quail’. The HiQ (pronounced as ‘Haikyu’) is a question which will feature every week, whose answer is so elusive to even the strongest quizzers, that they will most likely go undiscovered. They may be something highly esoteric, or something so old that even if you’re a boomer, you will likely not remember. If you crack a HiQ, you will be featured on our website’s Wall of Glory (or maybe something less corny. We are are working on the name) for an entire game-week (and whose tale of discovery will forever be etched in the documentation we maintain in our blogs).
Game-week 5’s HiQ was the question with the answer ‘Toxungen’. It was answered by 0 players, which makes it first question of the season to have gone unanswered.
The most answered questions were 11 in number, one less than last game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 29 games that happened). That means ~23% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions went up from 10.79 in GW4 to 11.39 in GW5.
The least correct answers of game-week 5 were both from the quad ‘Camping materials’, with only one correct answer each. We had accidentally wrote ‘portmanteau word’ instead of ‘compound word’ to refer to ‘ripstop’, as manoj saranathan pointed out. So, we may have had one more correct answer for ‘ripstop nylon’ from him, which is one of the two least correct answers. The other answer was ‘flysheet’. Both of these were answered by Sarah Trevarthen. In fact, she answered all four questions in the quad! Looks like Sarah is a great outdoor enthusiast. Congrats to cracking them all!
‘Camping materials’ was also the toughest quad in GW5 with an 11.38% answer rate, which makes it the hardest quad in the season so far! That’s 6.23% decrease from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). The most answered quad was the 'Space probes and space sounds', with a rate of 60.44% , a mere 0.22% increase from the easiest quad of GW4.
GW5 had the least maximum score of any of the game-weeks, with maximum points of 17, by Sandeep Hari. Two players were not present for this game, making this high score possible. This helped him become the only leader for the theme of History and Literature (and helped his sole opponent Maitrey Deshpande too). While this theme was represented by two quads, biology was represented by 6 quads with it being a primary or secondary theme.
Musketeers reappeared after a week of absence in GW4. Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. This game-week, we had three musketeers. Congrats for answering all four questions in a quad!
1Q) ‘Areography’ - Debjit Tripathy
4Q) 'Environmental toxicology involving birds' - Maitrey Deshpande
12Q) ‘Camping materials’ - Sarah Trevarthen
Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 3, other than the ones which already appear as musketeers, are:
1T) Physical Geography (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Debjit Tripathy
2T) History and Literature (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Sandeep Hari
2Q) ‘Birds in fiction’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sanat Pai Raikar & Pranjal Agrawal
3T) Biology (max = 11/24 (45.83%)) - Maitrey Deshpande
3Q) ‘Venom and poison’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Arun Hiregange
4T) Chemistry (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Maitrey Deshpande
5) Physics - ‘Space probes and space sounds’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sandeep Hari & Pranav Bontadkar
6) Engineering & Technology - ‘Pickup trucks’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jayakanthan R, Praveen VR, Venkatesh Srinivasan & Hari Parameswaran
7) Mathematics - ‘Geometry’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ronak Gupta, Reitesh Raman & Hari Parameswaran
8) Movies & TV - ‘Flowers in Bollywood’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Aditi
9) Music, Art and Architecture - ‘Green Features in Sports Venues’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Ujjwal Deb, Soumya Sharma, Abel Gilsing, Akshay Gurumoorthi, Ian Bayley, Samanth Subramanian, Jaidev Karunakaran, Amit De, Chandrakala Geddapu, Abhijith Bhadran, Dibyesh Hota, Sandeep Hari, Santonab Chakraborty, Aninthitha Nath, Kunal Mandal, Saahil Sharma, Sridhar Dharmapuri
10) Mythbusting - ‘Dietary Myths’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jyothi Mohan
11) Social Science & Psychology - ‘Mental illnesses of famous people’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jyothi Mohan
12T) Home & Hobbies (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Sarah Trevarthen