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Pub Trivia

Title text: Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by TRIVIA IS LATIN FOR THREE ROADS - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

Many pubs have trivia nights, where patrons form teams and compete to best answer questions about a range of topics. Cueball has apparently been hired by one bar to infiltrate other bars' quiz nights and write particularly bad questions for them, which he has accomplished using different strategies. The idea is that by making the trivia nights at other pubs horrible, he will drive business to the pub that hired him.

The comic shows Cueball reading off bad trivia questions which are either confusing, likely to provoke arguments, or don't have an answer.

1. Which member of BTS has a birthday this year?

Problem: multiple correct answers

BTS is a K-Pop group with seven members. Every member would have a birthday each year. In fact, all humans have a birthday every year. (Unless you were born on leap day and trying to be pedantic, or it was a year when the calendar changed.) Since this comic was published in 2024, even the possible February 29 exception does not apply (and no BTS member was born on February 29).

A more usual type of question might be to ask which member celebrates a birthday in a given day, or which celebrates a particular milestone birthday in the current year.

2. How many sides does a platonic solid have?

Problem: multiple answers, ambiguous language

There are five Platonic solids, with 4, 6, 8, 12 or 20 faces (colloquially called sides) in Euclidean 3-space. The solids have, respectively, 6, 12, 8, 30 and 30 edges (also occasionally called sides colloquially).

A more devious quizmaster might actually include this as a trick question with the correct answer being 'zero', since strictly speaking solids do not have 'sides'. However, on the basis of the other questions presented here it seems unlikely that Cueball intended for the question to be answerable in this (or any other) way, but a trick answer might be "one": the outside.

More usual questions might be "How many Platonic solids are there?" or "What is the highest number of faces on a Platonic solid?".

3. What is the smallest lake in the world?

Problem: arguable

Unknowable as there are many small bodies of water in the world, and determining which is the smallest while still being large enough to count as a lake is a complicated question. Further, the size of small lakes will fluctuate due to variability in precipitation, drought, etc. Some lakes only exist for brief periods (intermittent lakes).

An acceptable question might ask what is recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world's smallest lake (Benxi Lake in Liaoning Province of China which is only 15 m^2 in area).

A related classic trick question, in the UK, is "How many lakes are there in the Lake District?", for which the 'strict' answer is "one", as only Bassenthwaite Lake is actually called a lake, the others are mostly 'water's, 'mere's or 'tarn's.

4. Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks—Jaws (1975) or Lincoln (2012)?

Problem: trivial

Jaws is a famous movie about a killer shark, and features at least five fatal shark attacks. Lincoln is a movie about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, containing zero shark attacks^{[citation needed]}. Unlike the previous unanswerable questions, this is a question that no reasonable person could get wrong.

An actual quiz question might centre around how much the shark appears in Jaws (a surprisingly small amount). An actual comparison between the two movies might ask which won more Academy Awards.

5. How many planets were there originally?

Problem: ambiguous

The joke here is that "originally" is so poorly defined that it could mean anywhere from zero (the number of planets in our solar system prior to formation of the solar system, or in the universe prior to any solar system) to an unknown number in the trillions (number of planets in the galaxy) or some truly inconceivably large number that may not even be finite (number of planets in the universe, observable and unobservable). The ancient Greeks named seven planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Eventually, it was decided that the Earth is also a planet, and that the Sun and the Moon were not. Uranus and Neptune were eventually discovered, followed by Ceres, Vesta, Juno, and Pallas all of which were considered planets prior to the invention of the term "asteroid". Then Pluto was discovered, and the count of "planets" stabilized at nine until 2006, when the discovery of Kuiper Belt objects larger than Pluto led to creation of the term "dwarf planet". This leaves us today with a solar system of eight planets, five known dwarf planets and countless asteroids and Kuiper belt objects. There are also thousands of known exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than the sun).

6. What NFL player has scored the most points outside of a game?

Problem: unknowable

American football has a somewhat complicated scoring system, and record keeping involves (for instance) crediting the 6 points for a touchdown to both the receiver and the passer in some situations. This question does not address any of this complexity, but adds a new level of ambiguity as the "points" a player can score outside of a game are undefined. Is it any points scored in any game at all (e.g. Scrabble or Root) except football, or is it points that are not part of any game at all (e.g. "Wow, you made a good point, I need to reconsider my position")?

Normal questions might be about who scored the most points in a game, a season or a career.

7. The Wright brothers built the first airplane. Who built the last one?

Problem: unknowable

Since airplanes are built continuously, there is no way to know who built the most recent one. The question also seems to be asking for a name, but modern airplanes are assembled by many people following set protocols rather than by a few individuals who also designed the plane. Alternatively, if 'the last one' means 'the last one ever', then it probably hasn't been built yet (and hopefully won't be built for a long time).

The question's introduction is also wrong: the Wright Brothers managed the first sustained controlled flight of a powered heavier-than-air craft, but many others had built airplanes before them.

8. Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?

Problem: unknown, and possibly unknowable

This is an open question in math. Known as Goldbach's Conjecture, mathematicians widely believe that it is true, and it has held true for every number we've checked (and we've checked a great many numbers) but since almost all numbers have never been checked, we can't generalize that it will hold for ALL even numbers without proof. Since it is known that something can be true but impossible to prove or disprove, this may be the situation forever.

9. Not counting Canberra, what city is the capital of Australia?

Problem: no answer

Canberra is the only capital of Australia. Sydney is larger and possibly more famous, so that asking the capital of Australia would be a good trivia question: people who know their capitals would respond with Canberra and less knowledgeable people would incorrectly guess Sydney. Australia is divided into states and territories, each with its own capital, but this would leave multiple equally valid answers to the question.

Common questions similar to this might concern countries which have multiple capitals, where the capital has moved, or, as in this case, where it is not the most well known city in the country.

10. Who played the drums?

Problem: ambiguous

Lots of people have played the drums^{[citation needed]}, through the ages. If this question asked who played the drums for a particular band or on a particular album, track, or performance, it would be an example of a good trivia question. As it is, it has many possible answers and no way to choose between them.

The alt-text bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

Problem: multiple answers

All choices are technically correct. The word "London" may refer to the City of London, Inner London or Greater London; the City of London is a part of Inner London which is itself a part of (e) Greater London. Greater London is within (b) Great Britain (but it is not within Northern Ireland), (c) the UK, and (b) the British Isles. (d) incorrectly conflates Europe, a geographical area that London is located in, with the European Union, a political organization of which the UK (and consequently London) ceased being a member in 2020.

Additionally, the ceremonial area of Greater London (equivalent to an English county) consists of the thirty-two London Boroughs but does not include the boundaries enclave that is the actual City Of London, at the centre, which is only included in the 'administrative' Greater London.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball holding a microphone and reading from a sheet of paper]:

Welcome to pub trivia! Round one is 10 questions:

1. Which member of BTS has a birthday this year?
2. How many sides does a platonic solid have?
3. What is the smallest lake in the world?
4. Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks - Jaws (1975) or Lincoln (2012)?
5. How many planets were there originally?
6. What NFL player has scored the most points outside of a game?
7. The Wright brothers built the first airplane. Who built the last one?
8. Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?
9. Not counting Canberra, what city is the capital of Australia?
10. Who played the drums?

[Caption below the panel]:

A local pub trivia place hired me to run bad quizzes at competing bars.

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