quiz bowl

A game of trivia that involved answering questions for points. Two teams would go up against each other, and whichever one accumulated the most points won the game.

I joined up for a month because I thought I needed some more extracurricular activities, and this required very minimal effort. It involved showing up at the weekly match. Sometimes inbetween matches we'd have meetings and go over past questions. Adam, the high school's King of Trivia, would pretty much clean up. That's how it went during matches, as well. The memory that sticks out the most about this topic is a question during a match - "What is the largest human organ?" Adam replied, "the skin," which was not the answer on the card. At this point, Adam started screaming furiously in disagreement. He stalled the match for quite some time until the moderator threatened to toss him out.

Eventually I got sick of travelling to other schools for matches, and I had been on long enough to count it as an extracurricular activity, so I quit.

"Quiz bowl" is kind of a generic term, because College Bowl, National Academic Quiz Tournaments, and Academic Competition Federation are three U.S. organizations who all do some kind of trivia competition at the university or high school level, and then there's the University Challenge television show that was on in Britain, and other names (such as the "Scholastic Bowl" used by anotherone in his writeup).

Quiz bowl is a generic term for a team game done at high school and college level. Variations include College Bowl, Scholastic Bowl, and just plain Quiz Bowl.

During a quiz bowl tournament^* there are several rounds (Usually involving going up and down 2-3 flights of stairs every 20 or so minutes) and each team gets a tossup, no confering between teammates is allowed, and one loses points if they answer incorrectly while the moderator is reading. After this only the other team can answer. However, if that person gets it correct, they get a bonus that is worth much more and is often on a broader topic, confering between teammates is allowed here. Bonuses are where most points come from. A round is split into approximately 2, 9 minute intervals where you can make subsitutions once when the 1st interval ends.

Quiz bowl tournaments are rather sporatically setup around the Los Angeles area. I joined my school's team because I know a load of infinately random stuff, and it shows. If you join it and expect to get a trophy at each event, you will be sorely disappointed. It is quite hilarious to get quiz bowl prizes, usually consisting of Calvin and Hobbes books to The White Trash Cookbook (These were prizes at a USC tournament).

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* I'm going by NAQT standards, so if it differs, please tell me!