A set of 13 random questions

The answers to these questions have been posted as a comment. Please scroll down to find the scores

1. This Italian dessert typically made from sponge finger biscuits, espresso coffee, mascarpone cheese, eggs, cream, sugar, Marsala wine, cocoa, and rum, means "pick-me-up" metaphorically, "make me happy,"), a reference to the two caffeine-containing ingredients, espresso and cocoa. Which cake?

2. In 1900, André ______ published the first edition of a guide to France to help drivers maintain their cars, find decent lodging, and eat well while touring. It included addresses of things like gasoline distributors, garages, tire stockist , and public toilets. As motoring became more widespread, a rating system was developed which gave stars to restaurants. This grading system went on to become the ultimate recognition a restaurant could aspire for in Western Europe and is used by gourmets worldwide. What is this grading system called?

3. ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization. What does it specify? George Orwell had spent some of his time doing the same thing, as in standardizing the same thing.

4. Which Bollywood movie was based on Stephen King's story Quitter's Inc?

5. Fill in the blanks to get the name of a novel

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O ____ ___ ___

That has such people in't!"

These lines are taken from The Tempest.

6. X and Y were rivals in a sport for a long time. After retirement X came up with Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grill machine which went on to earn $100 million in sales since 1995. Now Y who had defeated X to become the world champ has come out with a brand called Real Deal grill to rival X's product. Id X and Y

7. Who now owns the Marquis de Sade's legendary castle at Lacoste, France, where he indulged in the atrocities attributed to him?

8. If we should be remembering Radhanath Sircar a Bengali mathematician, today, what would it be for? Our former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was of the opinion that Mr. Andrew Scott Waugh was unfairly giving credit to his former boss and instead Sircar should be bestowed with the honour. What did Sircar do?

9. Which capital city's name means "the hills of Impala" the antelope?

10. X is an English Mathematician working on number theory at Princeton. His areas of specialization include arithmetic of elliptic curves with complex multiplication. His most famous mathematical result is that "all rational semi stable elliptic curves are modular"; which is a way of proving Y. A special case of Y was first stated by Abu Mahmud Khujandi in the 10th century. Y is named after a French mathematician who felt that the margin of his copy of Arithmetica of Diaphantus was not wide enough. Id X and Y.

11. Originally published as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987, it was later republished as a trade paperback, which popularized a particular format. To date, it remains the only book of its genre to win a Hugo Award, and is also the only book of its kind to appear on Time Magazine's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present." It is set in 1985, in an alternative history United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The title of the book is derived from the phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, from Juvenal's Satire VI, "Against women", often translated as "Who watches the ______?"

12. This iconic scientist has a penchant for courting controversies. In his autobiography, Avoid boring People, he describes his academic colleagues as "dinosaurs", "deadbeats", "fossils", "has-beens", "mediocre", and "vapid". He was quoted as saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" as "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really." These quotes attributed to him drew attention and criticism from press in several countries and was widely discussed on CNN, the BBC, several papers, peers and by civil rights advocates. The common perception was that he was claiming a link between race and intelligence with the BBC stating that "he claimed black people were less intelligent than white people" Name this scientist who was in news for all wrong reasons during the last months of 2007.

13. "It’s a phenomenal instrument, one of those freaks of nature that come very rarely in a hundred years. Clear and penetrating it has a brilliant, metallic timbre and yet remains warm, with a gorgeous romantic sheen, an unforced, open throated quality that.." says conductor Richard Bonynge. What is he talking about?

The answers have been posted as a comment.

Now the scores..

Deepak Ranganathan 8
Manjith K 6
Raziman 12.5
Priya Kamala 7.5
Lloyd 12
Snehaj 4
Rajesh Mohan 4.5
Arun A S 4.5
Hrishi Varma 4
Goutam Jayasurya 4.5


Thank you very much for attempting the quiz!

The Third Grey Cells Open Answers

1 This device is believed to be invented by a Muslim scholar named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, known in the West as Al-Hazen. Its name means “dark chamber” and has lent a part of its name to its modern day derivatives. What?

Camera Obscura

2.This famous publicity campaign was created by photographer Oliviero Toscani. Under Toscani's direction ads were created that contained striking images unrelated to any actual products being sold by the company; a deathbed scene of a man (AIDS activist David Kirby) dying from AIDS, a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still attached, two horses mating, close-up pictures of tattoos reading "HIV Positive" on the bodies of men and women, a collage consisting of genitals of persons of various races, a priest and nun about to engage in a romantic kiss, and pictures of inmates on death row. The company's logo served as the only text accompanying the images in most of these advertisements. Which ad campaign?

Colours of Benetton

3 This ubiquitous chemical laboratory device was actually invented by Michael Faraday. But he design was not free of flaws and this prompted Peter Desaga an Instrument maker at the University of Heidelberg to perfect. Desaga incidentally worked for a famous chemist of the time and the device was named after the famous chemist rather than Desaga. This led to the widespread misconception that this device was invented by the famous chemist. What?

Bunsen Burner

4This ship was the first ship to sail under then new London Bridge as part of Queens Naval review. Its first major voyage was to Terra Del Fuego under the captainship of Capt Pringle Stokes. In the lonely waters of Del Fuego the Captain succumbed to deep depression and shot himself. For its second voyage Capt Robert FitzRoy was chosen to command her. In the wake of the misfortune of Capt Stokes, Capt FitzRoy worked out a solution to fight boredom. What happened as a result?

The ship was HMS Beagle and the Capt FitzRoy was advised to take Charles Darwin along, to fight boredom J. Rest as they say is history.

5. Different techniques of playing this instrument include legato-style, pizzicato, col legno, collé, ricochet, sautillé, martelé, spiccato, tremolando, staccato and mute.. What is the instrument in question?

Violin

6 In the Roman calendar, a month had only three named days and the remaining days of the month were arranged around these named days and they acted as reference points from which the other (unnamed) days were calculated. The first two of three named days were Kalends (1st day of the month) and Nones (the 7th day in March, May, July, and October; the 5th in the other months). What was the third named day?

Ides (the 15th day in March, May, July, and October; the 13th in the other months).

7. In 1964 J D Tippit, a police officer with Texas Police Department was posthumously awarded the Medal of Valor from the National Police Hall of Fame and also received the Police Medal of Honor, the Police Cross, and the Citizens Traffic Commission Award of Heroism. He was decorated mainly because he was the second victim of a famous assassin. who?

Lee Harvey Oswald

8. This floors of the hotel are named Social Sciences, Language, Maths and Science, Technology, The arts, Literature, History, GK, Philosophy and Religion. Each floor has six rooms and each of them is named after a sub classification of the particular floor’s name. For example the fourth floor, “Maths and Science” is has rooms named Astronomy, Dinosaurs, Botany, Zoology, Geology and Mathematics. Because of this classification scheme, the hotel owners were sued in 2003 by an organization called OCLC. OCLC reached an agreement with the hotel enabling the hotel to continue using the naming system. Why did they sue them?

This the Library Hotel near the New York Public Library and the rooms here are named according to the Dewey decimal classification. Online Computer Library Center(OCLC) owns the copy right.

9. The word literally means dead creek. They are very common in Australia and are formed when the path of a river changes leaving the former branch with a dead end. The most famous reference is the opening line of their National Anthem Waltzing Matilda. What is it?

Billabong

10. This dish is known as “Guss” in Iraq and is related to a dish Greek dish called Gyros.

The name by which we know it comes from a Turkish word meaning “Turning”. What are we talking about?

Shawarma

11. What was conceived by the Philological Society, London when three blokes Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall were dissatisfied with the available alternatives. Now days the “X” is known after a different institution all together. What?

The OED

12.

Dear Mr. X,

I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo", I am ready to come and make a film with you.

Y

This letter was the beginning of one of the most popular stories in cinema lore, ID X and Y.

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman

13. It was founded in England in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for famine, with a mission to send food through the Allied blockade to the citizens of Nazi-occupied Greece. The first overseas branch was founded in Canada in 1963, what are we talking about?

OXFam

14. According to the legend he is still alive but asleep with his knights in a cave in the mountain in Bavaria, Germany, and that when the ravens cease to fly around the mountain he will awake and restore Germany to its ancient greatness. According to the story, his red beard has grown through the table at which he sits. His eyes are half closed in sleep, but now and then he raises his hand and sends a boy out to see if the ravens have stopped flying. Name this king.

Barbarossa

15 He was the first Caribbean novelist to publish a novel in England. He was also a Trotskyite and his second best-known work of non-fiction was World Revolution published in (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky. In 1963 he published his personal memoirs which revolutionized a particular genre of writing and is still considered the greatest work in that genre, who and which book?

CLR James and Beyond a Boundary

16. This July a Federal District judge ruled that the Library of Congress violated the First Amendment rights of blind people by eliminating Braille editions of a particular magazine. The Library of Congress had to stop publishing due to lack of funds.The Braille edition of the magazine comes in four volumes and contains no pictures or advertisements. It is one among 35 other magazines in Braille published by the Library and none of them were dropped. This particular magazine was the 6th most popular of all magazines published by Library of Congress. Id the magazine.

Playboy

17. He had a physique superior not only to average people but also to his fellow athletes. His blood circulation had the ability to circulate 7 litres of oxygen around his body per minute, compared to the average amount of 3-4 litres of an ordinary person and the 5-6 litres of his fellow riders. Also, his lung capacity was 8 litres, compared to an average of 5 litres. In addition, his resting pulse was as low as 29 BPM, compared to a normal human's 60-90 bpm, which meant his heart would be less strained in the tough mountain stages. His VO2 max was 88 ml/kg/min; in comparison, Lance Armstrong's was 82 ml/kg/min. This retired Spanish cyclist was the first person to win Tour de France 5 consecutive times. Name him.

Miguel Indurain

18.This man made a bet with his captain that if he won an important match, the captain should buy him a particular suitcase he had seen in a Boston store. The American press got word of this deal and gave him a famous nickname. Who are we talking about?

Rene Lacoste and story behind the origin of the crocodile logo.

19. He was the Junior National champion in Diving for 6 years in a row from the age of 11.He also got a bronze medal at the lone National Games, in which, he participated. He rightfully claims to have been among the top 3 divers in the country until he retired at the ripe age of 19. His sporting excellence got him an admission to St. Stephen’s college and he later went on a year long scholarship to Davidson college, North Carolina. He played lot of first division club cricket for the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club and when he was in Hyderabad, he played for the Vazir Sultan Tobacco which was in the A-division of Hyderabad Cricket Leagues. He embarked on a new career altogether during the 9th Asian games in 1982. His career took off from the Commonwealth Games in ’82. Today he is one of the most recognized personalities in his field

Charu Sharma

20. It is also called “Physic nut” .It is the raw material for a famous product. In May 2005, Chief Minister Raman Singh became the first head of a state government to use this product. What are we talking about?

Jatropha

21. Ricardo Klement came to Argentina in 1950 under a Red Cross Passport. He tried different jobs from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer for a living. On May 11 1960 he was smuggled out of Argentina and was executed there after why? This particular incident (i.e. the hunt fort Ricardo and his execution was described in a book titled The House on Garibaldi Street written by someone called Isser Harel

Adolf Eichmann

22. In A.D. 711, _______ Ibn Zayid, the one eyed Umayyad general landed with his troops on the shores of Hispania (modern day Iberian peninsula). He ordered all his naval ships to be burnt so that his soldiers had no choice but victory. The Moorish forces soon defeated the visigoths and gained control of the peninsula. The place where they landed is now known after this general who led the invasion. Identify this place.

Gibraltar

23. This father of the nation is not revered much in his country. Having hailed from a family with revolution in its blood (his great uncle was beheaded for fighting the British) he took part in revolutionary activities right from his college days. He assumed the title of Thakin, a politically motivated title that proclaimed that the native people were the true masters of their country, not the colonial rulers who had usurped the title for their exclusive use. He opted for an armed liberation of his homeland and sided with Japanese to raise an Army. He attended the 1940 Indian National Congress Assembly at Ramgarh in India. The British tried to capture him but he fled back to his homeland. Later he abandoned his Japanese friends and helped the British to route the Japs out of the country. Shortly after the war he negotiated Independence with the British. But he was assassinated at the age of 32 before his country could attain Freedom. The reason why he is not recognized by the present rulers of his country might be attributed to his only daughter. Who is this?

Aung Sang