RSSeNEWS to be determined...

First place this year was taken by Mark Payton and his colleagues from the Oklahoma State University who win £100 in Amazon vouchers with their score of 91%, with the second prize of £50 of Amazon vouchers going to Gary Collins and Doug Altman who scored 89%. Both prizes are supplied by Minitab. Here we present the solutions. 

Q1. We asked you to identify written works from lists of the verbs that appear in their openings. a) ‘will drink smoke waste’ came from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (‘I will not... ...drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week...’), b) ‘was was was was was was was was was was’ came from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (‘It was the best of times....’), c) ‘is reveal conceal is’ came from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art...’), d) ‘has been working is present has stimulated’ came from the preface of Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers (‘For several years the author has been working in somewhat...’). 

Q2. We asked you to unscramble the titles of five UK number one singles and identify the connection. a) his nausea/dasher venison meat = I Have a Dream/Seasons in the Sun, b) pi onto enormity = Poetry in Motion, c) two way handout = What do you Want, d) inferno refracted = A Different Corner, e) yule police forays = Especially for You. These songs all knocked Cliff Richard from the number one spot (including Cliff Richard and the Shadows and Cliff Richard and the Young Ones). The songs replaced were, respectively: Millenium Prayer, I Love You, Travellin' Light, Living Doll, and Mistletoe & Wine. The title of the question was an anagram of ‘five UK number-one records’. 

Q3. We asked you to identify the works in which series of animals could be found.  a) A rabbit, caterpillar, pig, mock-turtle, and lobster, can be found in the chapter titles of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,  b) Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens contains a lion, hens & roosters, wild asses, tortoises, elephants, and ends with a swan, c) Pickles, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Jeremy Fisher, Mr Tod, Jemima Puddleduck, Samuel Whiskers, Pigling Bland and Pig Robinson, Timmy Tiptoes and Squirrel Nutkin, Ginger and Tom Kitten and Miss Moppet, as well as mice and rabbits are characters in Beatrix Potter titles, d) orangutans, monkeys, zebras, antelopes, giraffes, elephants, hamsters, and pigeons appear in At the Zoo by Simon and Garfunkel, e) The Twelve Days of Christmas contains 22 doves, 36 colly birds, 42 geese, 42 swans, and 30 French hens + 12 partridge. 

Q4. We asked you to note the connection between the Baker family in ‘Cheaper by the dozen’, Arthur, Benjamin and Edward Guinness – a family of Brewers, Frank, Ricky, Diane and Janine from EastEnders - the Butcher family, singers Karen and Richard of the Carpenter family, the founders of the Mayo clinic (William Worrell Mayo & sons Charles Horace and William James) – a family of Doctors, the Sainsburys (John James, Mary Ann and John Benjamin) – a family of Grocers with the slogan ‘Quality perfect, prices lower’, and the Brueghel family of Painters (Pieter the Elder, Pieter the Younger, Jan the Elder, Jan the Younger). While these families are of unknown disposition, they provide clues to seven of the original ‘Happy families’. Barber, Dyer, Milkman and Sweep were unclued. Jaques and sons were the (presumably happy) family who published the game.  

Q5. We asked you to identify the quantities that changed in the manner indicated. a) The numbers of teams at the football world cup finals were 13 in 1950, 16 in 1954, 24 in 1982, and 32 in 1998 but did not increase to 36 in 2006 despite suggestions from FIFA that they might.  b) The men’s 100m world record was 9.84 seconds leading into 1999 when it dropped to 9.79; it dropped to 9.77 in 2005, 9.74 in 2007, 9.72 and then 9.69 in 2008, and 9.58 in 2009. Drug assisted times have been ignored. [The final decrease was by 1.1%, not 0.9% as per the question – we apologise for this error.] c) The record for the highest individual test match innings was Hammond’s with 336 before Hutton increased it to 364 in 1938. Sobers increased it to 365 in 1968 before Lara, Hayden and Lara (again) moved it on to 375, 380 and 400 in 1994, 2004 and 2005 respectively. 

Q6. Here we had a mixed bag of questions. a) We asked you to identify, and place in order, the British prime ministers Lord ‘frozen’ North, the Duke of ‘beef’ Wellington, Sir Robert ‘orange’ Peel, the Earl of ‘Crown’ Derby, Edward ‘Hampstead’ Heath, and John ‘drum’ Major. b) We asked for the number shared by Chopin and Rossini if composers were associated with the day of the year on which they were born (Mozart was born on 27 January = 27 etc). Chopin  (1 March 1810) and Rossini (29 February 1792) were both born on the 60th days of  their respective years. c) The connection between the works was in their creators' names which were all colours: Giuseppe Verdi  (Aida), Horace Silver (The Preacher), Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (Croome Park), Marco Pierre White (The Devil in  the Kitchen). d) 50 (tin). These were chemical elements (denoted by atomic number) whose names could be made up of the chemical symbols of other elements. For example 6 (CaRbON) = 20 (Ca) + 37 (Rb) +  8 (O) + 7 (N). The other elements spelt out were iron, copper and bismuth. e) These were clues to Cluedo pieces: Mustard (a condiment), Plum (a fruit), Green (part of a golf course), Peacock  (a bird), Scarlett ([Rhett] Butler’s lady – with apologies) and White (part of an egg). 

Q7. Nobody managed to solve this question, so we are not giving the solution yet in case anyone would like to ponder on it further. The question was:

Mind the gaps

DS Hathaway read the piece of paper: ‘Mervyn Bunter to solve if Lord Wimsey’s speech fails. Spoil the good port? By ‘eck that’s a bad idea’. ‘It’s Morse’ he said, and after thinking briefly he suggested to Lewis that they should arrest the vicar for murder. Describe the crime.

Q8. We asked you to identify sets of books which closed with the words given. a) The six Jane Austen novels close with the words ‘been’, ‘them', ‘union’, ‘importance’, ‘husbands’ and ‘disobedience’.  b) The six books of The Lord of the Rings close with the words ‘more’, ‘Shadow’, ‘wind', ‘enemy’, ‘more' and ‘said’. c) Six of the seven volumes of ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ end with the words ‘années’, ‘d’or’, ‘tous’, ‘l’heure’, ‘plus’, ‘Temps’.