2922: Pub Trivia

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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 a TRIVIAL BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

The comic shows Cueball reading off bad trivia questions which are either confusing or don't have an answer. The caption states that this is because he was paid to sabotage other bars that offer trivia so that people will want to go to the one that hired him.

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

BTS is a K-Pop group. Every member would have a birthday each year. In fact, al humans have a birthday every year. (Unless you were born on leap day and trying to be pedantic.)

2. How many sides does a platonic solid have?

There are five platonic solids, with 4, 6, 8, 12, or 20 faces (colloquially called sides) in Euclidean 3-space.

3. What is the smallest lake in the world?

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.

4. Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks? Jaws (1875) or Lincoln (2012)

Jaws, as Lincoln has a surprising lack of shark attacks.^{[citation needed]}

5. How many planets were there originally?

Question lacks context, since it doesn't define what originally means, and there is no way to know when humans first found out that the wandering stars were actually other worlds, or that Earth is a planet. And if this includes exoplanets, it's unknowable since we have no way of detecting these planets in ancient times.

Or it could be trivially 0, if "originally" means when the universe first formed in the Big Bang.

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

As points are not usually scored outside of games, this is a nonsense question.

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

Since airplanes are built continuously, there is no way to know who built the last one.

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

This is an open question in math.

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

Nonsense question, since Australia has only one capital.

10. Who played the drums?

Lots of people have played the drums^{[citation needed]}, famous or not. This question needs context.

The alt-text bonus question:

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

All choices are technically correct as they are various geographical areas that include the city of London, England. However, (d) could be wrong, since the UK has not been a member of the EU since Brexit in 202.

|}

This is apparently deliberate (at least on behalf of the organisers), perhaps to upset or otherwise impede groups of overconfident quizzers who would otherwise dominate any genuinely good quiz. -->

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 to write particularly bad questions, 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.

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

Since everyone has a birthday every year (with the exception of those born on February 29), this question does not have unique answer. And 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).

2. How many sides does a Platonic solid have?

This question is ambiguous in at least two ways. First, a solid does not have "sides"; it has edges and faces. There are five Platonic solids, with 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20 faces, and 6, 12, 8, 30, and 30 edges.

3. What is the smallest lake in the world?

A lake is defined by Wikipedia as a "relatively large and fixed body of water." As there is no universal definition for how large and how fixed a body of water must be in order to qualify as a lake, this question is impossible to answer.

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

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, and contains zero shark attacks. Unlike the previous unanswerable questions, this is a question that no reasonable person could get wrong.

5. How many planets were there originally?

The ancient Greeks named five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Eventually, it was discovered that the Earth is also a planet. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were eventually discovered, and when Randall was growing up there were nine planets. The discovery of Kuiper Belt objects larger than Pluto led to the downgrading of Pluto to a "dwarf planet." This has been referenced in previous comics. The dwarf planet Ceres was briefly classified as a planet as well. Today there are thousands of known exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than the sun). The joke here is that "originally" could have meant before the solar system formed (so zero) or in ancient times (so 5) or in the 1980s (so 9), or it could mean how many planets in the Universe (so an astronomically large number).

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

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.

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

It is exceedingly unlikely that the last airplane has been built, and because plane assembly is complicated, it is difficult to assess when a particular aircraft counts as complete, so this is another unanswerable question.

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

This is Goldbach's Conjecture. Mathematicians widely believe that it is true, and there is substantial numerical evidence to suggest that it is true, but there is as yet no accepted proof. The joke is that trivia questions should have clear and agreed on answers, and this question does not.

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

Canberra is the 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 there capitals would respond with Canberra and less knowledgeable people would 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.

10. Who played the drums?

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.

Transcript

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Discussion

I expect that the BTS question is a reference to the traditional Korean system of counting a person's age in units of Sal which started at 1 and incremented on the first day of the year. Since this system was abandoned on official documents in 2023, but is still in use in some contexts, the question of whether every member of BTS had a "birthday" on the first day of the year is ambiguous. Philhower (talk) 14:13, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

This is marked as fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csSYfPaBaS4, but was it?

question 5, planets exist outside the solar system, adding to the ambiguity. Philhower (talk) 14:15, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

One of the requirements in the definition of a planet is that it orbits the Sun, so no there are no planets outside the Solar system. Tharkon (talk) 17:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

NASA disagrees. Exoplanet Archive shows 5612 confirmed planets. -- Hkmaly (talk) 20:55, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The IAU is the body that defines such things - and they do say that planets have to orbit the Sun...things that orbit other stars are properly called "exo-planets". But still - do we include dwarf planets? Rogue planets? It's definitely a crazy-vague question. 172.70.211.219 21:05, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

the IAU is one body that claims the authority to define such things, but their authority is not recognized by any of the things they are claiming the right to name. (Except for a very small part of earth, mostly made of humans) 172.69.58.203 00:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

That seems ridiculous, "If it isn't one of ours it don't count"? That'd be like saying "They're only 'cars' if they use North American roads, in other countries using THEIR roads you have to call them exo-cars!". LOL! And every future/space-based fiction calls them planets, just makes more sense not to be so arbitrarily exclusionary. Ours isn't the only sun, we shouldn't pretend it has some aspect that makes it count more than others - outside of that it's the one with us. NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:09, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Correction, the IAU definition explicitly states that it is only about planets within the solar system and has no comment about exoplanets one way or the other. Presumably, to leave some flexibility on all the weird edge cases that are bound to come up with exoplanets. https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf 172.68.195.213 07:55, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Gas giants should be excluded too - they're not planets - just wannabe stars.172.70.163.31 08:34, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

I think the correct answer is 0: before the solar system formed there were no planets. So, originally, there would have been none. If exo-planets count, going back to the beginning of time gives the same answer: when the universe came into existence during the big bang there were no stars, let alone planets orbiting them. Even religion agrees: in the beginning God created the earth and the heavens, but the sun came later, so technically earth was not a planet since it didn't orbit anything.--162.158.62.49 22:23, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

As for question 9, please see the note about the history of Austrailia's capitals at: [[1]]. and the page regarding countries with multiple capitals [[2]] Philhower (talk) 14:24, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

See Also List of Australian capital cities - As an Australian, I believe many would also consider the major city in their state/territory to be a capital city, although not the capital of Australia.

The explanation misses the possibility that this is a Dad joke: where the capital city of Australia is 'Canberra,' as long as the respondent doesn't actually count either the letters in Canberra (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) or the population of Canberra (unknowable/ambiguous). Bilkie (talk) 14:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

About the alt text, London is certainly in Europe. The question itself is malformed because "Europe (or 'the EU')" is not self-consistent: there is a lot of European countries that are not part of the EU. RedGolpe (talk) 14:32, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The "Greater London" answer is also tricksy, as the "ceremonial county" of GL may not include the additional area of the City Of London (though it does include the City Of Westminster, which is sometimes the trick answer to certain trick questions that a quizmaster might attempt to pull). The administrative Greater London is the ceremonial one plus CoL, however... 172.70.162.19 15:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I would argue London is not in Europe because there is no clear definition for Europe as a geographic area, it really doesn't have an eastern border that is not arbitrary, so the only clearly defined thing Europe can refer to is the EU. Tharkon (talk) 17:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

London, France is both in Europe and the EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_France 172.70.163.49 18:00, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

While the eastern border of Europe is not clearly defined I am not aware that there is any definition of (geographic) Europe that excludes the islands (and subsequently London) --162.158.202.135 21:24, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

There's "mainland Europe", excluding islands. Or at least any of several possibly island archipeligos and/or island nationstates. e.g. Mont-Saint-Michel might not be (exluded, that is, due to being French and having a (tide-dependant) ground access), Jersey would be (British Crown Territory island), Malta probably (island state), Sicily would depend on your thinking (it being Italian, and much larger than the strait that makes it an island offshoot). Most of Scandinavia might be interestingly included (with Denmark) or excluded (with Iceland), according to context. Even Gibraltar might or might not be, depending upon upon the thinking (or lack of it) behind the use of the term. (But, fiddling around the edges aside, (the English) London is not in "mainland Europe" and hasn't been for maybe a full 10kY before it became "London" in any useful sense.) 172.70.163.49 23:44, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The phrase "continental Europe" is also used, and might be implied by a British person saying "I travelled around Europe last year". 172.69.195.54 15:01, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

The (semi-)apocryphal headline "Fog In Channel, Continent Cut Off" is perhaps indicative of the Continental Europe#Great Britain and Ireland British collective mindset (of which I must therefore be a component, albeit not at that end of the spectrum). 172.71.242.71 15:39, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd say The European Council has at least as good (or bad, depending which way you look at it) a claim to be 'Europe' as the EU does, and London (through the UK) is in that (for now, anyway).172.71.242.55 09:07, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

The Benxi Lake is actually considered to be the smallest lake in the world. 172.70.135.205

^{[citation needed]}172.70.86.176 14:40, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Many websites says Benxi lake is recognized by Guinness records, but guinnessworldrecords.com does not have such a record. Either they recognized smallest lakes previously but not anymore, or they never had such a record and we are witnessing citogenesis ([3]) 172.71.154.210 17:33, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

I've been getting the Guinness World Records book for 20 years. I just checked my 2004 edition, and there is no record for "smallest lake". Doesn't mean it wasn't left out due to space concerns, but I'm not checking all the books. NealCruco (talk) 04:34, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

I never realized how challenging it is to edit pages when they've just been posted. Makes me long for something like Google docs.172.68.3.43 14:39, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

People, who are born on 29th February don't have a birthday in years which are not leap years. However, 2024, when this comic was published is a leap year. --162.158.95.9 14:40, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

"5. How many planets were there originally?" This could also refer even back to the start of the universe, when there were (likely) just 0 planets. --162.158.86.101 14:43, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I anticiated a lot of Edit Conflicts, but not actually quite so many as to not to be able to resolve my edits with everyone else's. This is the bare-bones that I was putting in (until finding multiple attempts tried to be added consecutively...

...make use of it however you wish, anybody who has the time not to keep chasing all the simultaneous edits. (The above is a bit behind 'perfection', and lacks many of the integrations, wikilinks and adjustments I had made. I backspaced out of the edit I had finally reached, before remembering to take a full copy into my paste-buffer!) 172.70.90.115 14:53, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought the answer to #2 could be 1, because as 3D solids they only have one surface. I would guess the player with the most points outside of a game is the one who's played idlers (like Cookie Clicker) the longest — though I suppose those could be considered "inside of a game" as well. Also, I played the drums. 172.70.254.143 15:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The answer to #2 is '2 - the in-side and the out-side'.172.69.43.242 15:46, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Considering the platonic solids explanation lists all the correct answers, could someone include a list of all the members of BTS and their respective birthdays? Bing copilot suggests the following:

1. **Jin (Kim Seok-jin)**:

- Birthday: **December 4, 1992**

2. **Suga (Min Yoon-gi)**:

- Birthday: **March 9, 1993**

3. **J-Hope (Jung Hoseok)**:

- Birthday: **February 18, 1994**

4. **RM (Kim Nam-joon)**:

- Birthday: **September 12, 1994**

5. **Jimin (Park Ji-min)**:

- Birthday: **October 13, 1995**

6. **V (Kim Tae-Hyung)**:

- V's birthday is **December 30**, but the year is not mentioned in the provided information.

7. **Jungkook (Jeon Jungkook)**:

- Jungkook's birthday is **September 1**, but the year is not mentioned in the provided information.

172.70.162.19 15:48, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to adding BTS birthdays, but I think it should be done by someone more knowledgeable about the band than me. Birthdays can be a surprisingly nuanced subject.Comatoran (talk) 15:59, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia says '95 and '97 respectively172.70.162.37 16:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

London is both a City (London) and a City within a City (The City of London) and an Area (Greater London) There are also many more places named London than the one that is the Capital of the UK .. Serbia, France, Canada (Which is larger and the one in the UK), 10 in the USA, and one on Kiribati 17:56, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Are you saying London, Ontario, Canada is BIGGER than the more famous London, England??? That's a country capital! Is that seriously true? I'm Canadian, I don't know London, ON as being THAT big... NiceGuy1 (talk) 05:52, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

It's very unlikely to be larger in population terms than the (common!) wider definition of the main UK London, as that would make it larger than any other city in Canada by a large margin. In terms of area, London ON is very likely to be larger than the City of London (which is surprisingly small). More widely, the definition of what actually is a "city" is more complex than it appears to be at first glance; administrative areas (what official statistics are collected for) are often quite different from where the bulk of people are. --162.158.74.25 07:20, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Some wikipedia figures, for reference:

• London, Ontario = 168.76 sq mi, Population 422,324
• City of London, subset of Capital of UK = 1.12 sq mi, Population 8,618
• London, administrative/etc capital of UK = 606.96 sq mi, Population 8,799,800
• London, Belgrade = a 'neighbourhood' (<1 sq mi?), Population unknown
• London, France = 'a small agricultural village'
• ...
• 8837 London = 1.5 mi diameter (~28s q mi, ~14 cu mi?), Population... some of the Clangers?

I skipped a few of the others (e.g. the various US ones: cities, townships, communities)... 162.158.230.46 18:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm surprised there were no phishing-type questions (i.e. "what are the last four digits of your social security number", "what are the three numbers on the back of your debit card", etc).22:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The only correct answer(s) to "who played the drums" would be "the drummer", or "twelve drummers", but I would accept Phil Collins, Alex Van Halen, or Ringo Starr for half a point each 108.162.241.100 02:40, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

"Who played the drums" is Keith Moon; in this cryptic clue, "Who" is the name of the band, and "played the drums" indicates the drummer; hence the answer is Keith Moon, the drummer of The Who. Sabik (talk) 04:29, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Clearly the correct answer is 'Animal'.172.71.178.176 08:45, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

I asked my Mom these questions & she said the answer to #7 so flatly: Boeing ProphetZarquon (talk) 02:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

On the Capital of Australia: Melbourne hosted parliament before Canberra was built, and Jervis Bay was part of the ACT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jervis_Bay_Territory

Are there people outside of the USA that are surprised to learn that Washington D.C. is the capital of the USA, rather than New York, Los Angeles, Chicago etc. due to its relatively small population? ("only" ~670000 in 2024) These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 06:50, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I came here all prepared to say that the Title Text should have Ontario, Canada as a (likewise correct) answer, but I see somebody already put that into the table, LOL! I feel like the "More Reasonable" version of the planet question should NOT mention Pluto, it should be the question IMPLIED in the comic whose answer is 9 (such as "How many planets were originally in our Solar System", but without the ambiguity of "originally". Basically a question whose answer is 9, pushing people to include Pluto, while allowing people the mistake of saying the current answer of 8, but mentioning Pluto would ruin that/the question). NiceGuy1 (talk) 05:52, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

There could also be a person Named "London" who is located somewhere, perhaps in the same bar (or not) -- 172.70.46.71 12:13, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_%28name%29 172.70.42.31 16:27, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought I knew the minimum size of a lake by definition, at least in the US, but I just found different authorities asserting 1, 10, and 20 acres as the distinction between a lake and a pond. Two non-metric distinctions are that a lake has an aphotic (dark) zone, or a lake is fed and drained by a river, but they don't help here. 172.70.43.53 16:22, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

For the love of god can we stop saying that Pluto was "demoted" to a dwarf planet? It didn't have its category changed, it had its category defined (for the first time!). It was a founding member of a newly named category. And it's not like planets are better than dwarf planets, they're just different. (I'm going to die on this hill, ain't I?) 172.68.34.16 01:35, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, you probably are. When it happened, many people, including astronomers, considered it a downgrade. There's some prestige in being a planet -- the Sun and the planets are considered the most significant objects in the Solar System. The qualifier suggests that it's less important than the "real" planets, and was kicked out of the planet club for being deficient in some way. Maybe we need a campaign from dwarf humans to remind everyone that they're just smaller, but they have no less dignity. Barmar (talk) 23:41, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I'll cheerfully die there with you. But I'll also point out while I'm doing so that if it's a 'dwarf planet', then clearly it is still a planet. I mean, people would look at you funny if you tried to claim that a dwarf elephant wasn't an elephant. And perhaps more pertinently, a dwarf star is still a star. So the answer to 'how many planets are in our solar system?' is 'at least 16 that we know of - depends how far down you count. Unless you discount the gas giants, in which case you need to subtract four. Or maybe two. Wait - how many are we on now again?'172.71.178.157 11:14, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

I'll happily agree with you, and I've often said the same as Mr./Ms 178.157 above me that "dwarf planet" still sounds like a type of planet to me. However, it WAS demoted. Officially, the Solar System is now 8 planets. Pluto is no longer an official member of the Solar System, despite not leaving or being destroyed. THAT'S the part that's bothersome, a statistic from our childhood - "The Solar System has 9 planets" - was changed, seemingly unnecessarily, since nothing ACTUALLY happened to Pluto. Why can't a Dwarf Planet count as a member? Why kick Pluto out? Colloquially, though not politically correct, Little People have been called dwarves, should they therefore not count as people? Are they too small to be "people"? They have a qualifier added to "people", just as Pluto has a qualifier added to "planet", after all. :) It doesn't seem difficult to bring this to somewhere where it's more clearly wrong. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:50, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

For the planet question there's also Theia, which is theorized to have been a planet prior to smashing into proto Earth and forming the moon and modern larger Earth. So there used to be at least nine planets by the current definition in our solar system. 162.158.155.20 03:50, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

For question #8, it's not that mathematicians were idling around. A lot of partial results were made, see Wiki. 172.71.160.33 08:22, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I was confused by this question at first. The answer is "no." It is disproved by example. 21+3=24 21 is not a prime. 24 is even. 162.158.154.65 (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

24 is the sum of many pairs of numbers. Amongst those pairs (as with any even number >2) may be one ore more pairs of primes (even 2, if you count 1 as a prime - though generally one doesn't). 24 is (just looking at the odd numbers >1) 21+3, 19+5 (both primes!), 17+7 (both primes), 15+9 (no), 13+11 (both primes) and then of course the reverses of these (if you count those). So 24 is the sum of two primes (three, or six, times). 4 is just the sum of 2+2, 6 is only 3+3, 8 is only 5+3... And every even number checked from there on up can be expressed as the sum of two primes (at least once). But is there ever a point at which there is an even number that is not?

With 3, 5 and 7 being primes, then you can definitely say that if N is an even number that has (or even relies upon) a solution with 3, then N+2 and N+4 are, which would be answerable by the same sum but with 5 or 7 instead. Plus N+8 (3->11), N+10 (3>13). And maybe you can fill in the N+6 and N+8 by the other prime used being also a suitable twin prime that you can swap out for the P±2 partner. But only if it's the right prime of any given pair, and not all primes are twins, so there's a lot more to consider about whether any given advancement up the even-numnber ladder can be answered by a suitable pair of primes.

e.g. 15440=7717+7723 (one possible solution). 15442 therefore needs +2 to that. But 7717 and 7723 ar adjacent primes that areen't two apart (so you can't just add two to 7717 and have 7723 + 7723) and the next adjacent primes are 7703 and 7727 (not two apart, and not obviously useful to go 7717->7703, either). So there must be another solution (theoretically, but also proven by having been checked). By doing quite a bit of to-and-fro (if that's how we're doing it), we can finally announce that 15442=7649+7793 (but I also found 7523+7919, 7541+7901, 7559+7883 and 7589+7853, before I stopped the search). So It works up to 15442.

15444? Well, neither 7649 or 7793 have a +2 prime-partner. But 7589 is followed by 7591 (as a new partner to 7853). And 7559 is followed by 7561, so 7561+7883 would also be an answer. There will (probably) be many others.

But will there always be many others? Or even just the one? I'm sure someone has been counting how many unique (bidirectional) solutions each number has, and probably there are some that only just get the requisite single pair of primes that sum to it. Could it ever not even manage that? Those actually familiar with the efforts to prove the conjecture would know, rather than a fool like me coming fresh to the problem. (Relatively, that is... I already knew about it, but I've never tried to wade into the actual theory until right now, and this random example I set up to 'explain' this, just now.) 172.71.242.175 21:01, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

It looks like it was a mistake on my part to infer that the question meant "exclusively the sum of two primes." Allen 162.158.62.237 15:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Well, no number is "just the sum of two primes" (4=3+1, and 1 isn't prime; or 4+0, and neither of those are; all before considering negative, fractional or even complex/quaternian 'summations' (e.g. (2+3i)+(2-3i)=4), which primes definitely are not part of, regardless of how they together become '4'...), so "Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?" sort of has to imply only that there "are two primes which sum", rather than ever "the only numbers which sum will all be primes". Hyper-pedanticity (or deliberate linguistic trickery) aside, that's really not in question.

But nice to understand where you were coming from, at least. 172.70.163.49 20:15, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

• About Q2: the "number of sides" may be "the average number of sides" of a Platonic solid, which is 10, despite having no Platonic decahedron
• About Q10: with a correct list of answers, it may be kept as-is with having to select the drummer(s).

162.158.78.38 10:47, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

That assumes that the Platonic solids occur in equal numbers in the universe. In actuality, there are probably more of some than others, which would throw your average off. Alternatively, you could argue that none of any of them actually exist (by virtue of them being Platonic, and any example being an imperfect approximation), in which case the answer is either 'none' or 'unanswerable', since you can't average nothing.172.70.85.156 12:39, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

The smallest lake in the world is Snowf Lake. 172.70.34.58 (talk) 02:22, 23 April 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The title text reminds me of some old viral social media post where an alleged smart-a** teacher made a test question that was like "What is the opposite of 'old'? (a) new (b) young". (I don't remember if it was specifically mentioned, but the implication was that the question would then be graded completely arbitrarily.) Zowayix (talk) 21:01, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Smallest lake

IMHO there is a reasonable interpretation of the smallest lake question: what is the smallest officially named naturally occurring body of freshwater. Stevage (talk) 06:31, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Does this go so far as to include "...that has the word 'lake' in it"? (Or ’lac’, or other acceptably exact linguistic equivalent, perhaps?)

There is the "How many lakes are there in the Lake District?" classic British quiz question. Possible answer: there are perhaps 21(ish) 'lake-like' water bodies, but only Bassenthwaite Lake is called a lake, the rest are 'water's, 'mere's, 'tarn's (maybe then "not-a-lake", like "lochens are not lochs") and a handful of reservoirs (maybe not a lake, for being not natural?). Thus to avoid trouble, and especially how far to go to down the "pond, pool and puddle" route, the only truly unambiguous answer, once you know the 'trick', is "one". (Noting that "Lake Windermere" is a common misnomer for the body of water that is really just "Windermere", the actual largest "English lake". It having perhaps been tautologically enhanced to distinguish from "Windermere, the town", the main settlement in the area that was actually called Birthwaite prior to the arrival of the railway station that took the 'lake' name and then just rolled with it for the benefit of the unwashed/washed visiting masses.)

...this being sort of summarised in the Explanation at one point, actually, but got considered surplus. But a "smallest lake in the Lake District" question of this kind now explicitly excludes all the arguments about whether that means Easedale Tarn (by most linear dimensions) or Hayeswater (volumetric), whether or not you subscribe to other physical classification exclusions or the "Lake Windermere" name. 172.70.163.48 08:54, 24 April 2024 (UTC)