Week 304: The Implied Which
Last week we went through the idea of a small set of facts which would be useful for someone trying to answer the question: “Is there a list of the facts you need to know start out in quiz bowl?” And with that we wanted to create a set of representative facts which would guide them to the ideas of similar structures of facts. We dealt with the ones that are hardest to generate a pattern from, and require the player to live through the process of collecting information from hearing questions.
The next set to go through is a little easier to see a pattern. I warn you now, none of the facts will strike you as particularly interesting, but they are a kind of structural component that gives a tossup question more material than a single fact. A lot of these types of facts are just conduit to direct a leadin the writer had to use to its answer. But if you’ve internalized the information you’ll be able to take prior information given and combine it with these boring facts to reach the answer.1
Lyme - Geography connects everything.
The disease known as Lyme disease was first identified from sufferers around Lyme, Connecticut.
When I looked at the book that kicked this off, this was the first fact I saw, and what got me a little irritated. This is a place to organize around, a geographic name and associations that allows the writer to put either Lyme disease or Connecticut as the answer. That’s also what makes it boring or arbitrary. Everything has to happen somewhere and that’s just where it happened. It gets you to the answer but it doesn’t tell you anything special about Lyme, Connecticut.
Siam - Chronological transition.
Siam was an old name for Thailand.
If everything that can be asked had to happen somewhere, everything that can be asked had to happen sometime. As we previously mentioned. chronological facts aren’t as useful as geographical facts because you can’t define the answer of a moment of time as easily as a place. But we can use time to place things in order, and explain cause and effect simply in questions. So anything that is a chronological transition from one state to another could become information for a question, and this points the way to part of that.
Rhys - Completion or extension of a set—specifically sequels and prequels.
The book Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys was a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre.
There are plenty of facts consumed for quizzing which are either “These are the components of a set” or “This work extends the set.” The particular fact of Wide Sargasso Sea being a prequel to Jane Eyre was a longstanding cashable fact for a college player, not only because it represented extension of the set, but because it was another person extending the set.
Ohio - Translation from the visual.
The Ohio River is the result of the joining of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at Pittsburgh.
While it’s true to write it as a sentence, it is something that is even clearer to someone who sees it on a map, or in real life. Like our fact about jade from last week, you can visualize this in your head, either as a picture of the rivers, or an abstract diagram, either is a way to keep the studied material easily on hand.
Triceratops - Vocabulary and etymology are inescapable pieces of phrasing a question.
The name of the dinosaur triceratops translates as “three horned face.”
While it’s more true and certainly more explicit in televised competition, questions that incorporate vocabulary or etymology of the answer can never be fully removed from quiz bowl, it just may be making an allusion to another word with the same etymological root. Since most televised science questions default to vocabulary, understanding ancient Greek and Latin can get you far in the show, just not in the way you would expect.
As a bonus item: here’s a set of root words tailored towards dinosaur names. You can see how this would turn into a set of questions: https://www.amnh.org/dinosaurs/dinosaur-names
These are the clues which fall in the realm of the implied Which? The implied which is an idea that every clue in a quiz bowl question is beholden to the clues which came before it. So every time a clue establishes a limitation on the possible answers, it can be rephrased as “Which [of the remaining answers] has this quality?”
A question beginning “This person [did this]” can be rephrased as “Which of all the humans who have ever existed [did this]. While it’s a finite list not infinite, it’s certainly not countable in the time that the clue is read.
All of the clues above are types of which statements, Which dinosaur? Which river? Which country? Each of them is taking the immense list of possible answers and shaving it down to a few dozen possibilities. And each which can then compound each other’s effect. They’re a set of filters, either establishing or restating the class of answer to which they belong, and then giving a detail to identify which of the more limited set of possibilities is the correct one.
The other thing about which statements is that they may not necessarily be uniquely identifying. Usually they are, and the second case is that they may uniquely identifying for the identifier of information, or they may be uniquely identifying in the face of the combination of prior clues. (Consider a clue that establishes “its capital is Victoria,” which itself is not uniquely identifying without an identifier to tell you whether it’s a nation, province, island, or county.2 The prior clues have to establish that before the question can be answered, and hopefully the writer has made it so.)
This is why this wide swath of clues can’t be the first clue asked, but can fill the interim between the first and last clues. And if we focus on the clues in this class we can see that this type of information usually exists in orderly blocks of information which can solve any member of the class of answer specified by the identifiers before it. These blocks of information are drawn from repeatedly, and as such, they’re more likely to have a clue of the same style appear in another packet or another tournament.
They are not quite last clues. A last clue has to work as both as uniquely identifying for all members of what the first identifier in the question gave, and as a clue that the most possible players could know. A last clue about states would use the capital or its largest city, because every state has one of those, and it’s drilled into people as important to remember. A clue which asks which state hosted the Olympics in a particular year will be in the middle because not all states have hosted, and it’s a second layer of filters.
The other thing to note about these is that the middle clues that these represent are frequently the final fill of the question, dedicating the least cognitive load, and the least effort to use. There’s no shame in it, some clues have to be the least considered in a question, and if the writer is inspired by the leadin they find, and then need to find the most common last clue to ensure the question is converted, they’ll be anxious to complete this, and so they will trudge through the data as quickly as possible, and rely on the tools and data that they have used before.
What we discussed in the previous week was how you collect first clues that will pay off once, but spectacularly. These facts are the ones that will come up or show patterns that will come up more often, but be later in the question. Knowing these gives you advantage over those who only know the last clue, but show you how to collect more advantages in more questions.
The new year came and with it a series of notes telling me everything that came loose into the public domain. This spawned two pieces of thought for the book:
1) there is no limit to the number of annual occurrences which pass in front of people’s news feeds and could be useful to know. I know this implicitly, and I do try to look around for such events every year. It serves me as a source of knowledge for writing and for quizzing. But what I don’t do with this is formalize it. If I put it into a calendar with annual repeating reminders I could offload the cognitive burden of noticing, and I could pass that on to anyone who needed similar prompting. That seemed at least worth pursuing.
What would we put on this calendar with annual reminders? Obviously what started the question:
Jan 1 - Check what is in public domain for this year.
Let’s expand out from there:
Jan 1 - Who is listed in the year in review of deaths?
add the New Year’s Honours for Order of the British Empire if you’re dealing with a British audience of either writers or players and you’re got a nice schedule for that day for yourself.
And since I saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rebroadcast set for Jan 1, I’d immediately add the list for next year, on the proper timeframe.
Apr 1 - Who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year?
In this case it’s not all that important to pick the exact right day, as long as it doesn’t slide off the to-do list. You want to have the reminder there to look it up and have that knowledge, whether or not you intend to write anything about it.
Let’s keep adding to the calendar:
Oct 7 - Watch for who wins the Nobel Prizes this week.
Nov 1 - Who won the Booker Prize this year for what book?
Jan 23 - Who was nominated for Oscars?
Nov 6 - Who won local, state, and federal elections?
Nov 16 -Who won the Grey Cup?
We can also use this to spread down into monthly or weekly checks. A reminder to check the NAQT You Gotta Know on the First of the month is not a bad idea.
In setting this up, I’d ask you to write these as questions to yourself, or imperative orders to yourself. If you want to have the knowledge you want to give yourself the task of looking it up and interacting with the knowledge. This can be a training thing, or a coaching thing, but its effect will be multiplied when shared with other people.
2) the mention of Nancy Drew being in the public domain popped her Stratemeyer Syndicate roommates the Hardy Boys into mind. One of the great dumb buzzes of my career was three-and-a-half words into the title “While the Clock Ticked,” the 11th book in the series. I was able to pull that that fast because I had read the back cover of one Hardy Boys book where the whole list of the series was printed, and I remembered it specifically as the least like the other titles. There’s two lessons here: writers are generally attracted to outliers in the set, and to treat what you observe and study like the buffalo, and use the whole thing.
Two articles on 2026’s public domain works:
https://mymodernmet.com/whats-entering-the-public-domain-2026/
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/
While I don’t want to bother with AI in this section, I do want to note that knowing the boring details helps you to not only answer questions but to ascertain the value of what someone says or writes. If they are botching the simple facts, their whole argument becomes suspect. The facts of this type aren’t likely to be the focus of an AI’s argument, so if it were to hallucinate up a detail in support, someone trained to observe and who has acquired the boring knowledge is going to question the presented result. But if you also don’t know the basic facts, you won’t have your suspicions raised.
Heaven forbid you get this sort of question which used the identifier “polity” in its first clue. I’ve always considered the use of the term in a question too cute by a half, but I’ve never been able to crystallize the exact point in specifics, so this week’s writing has at least given this example.