Quiz Night Tonight?

What is the longest London tube line? How many James Bond movies have just one word in the title?

My colleague Eva and I recently attended a Charity Quiz Night and had a great time. If you have not been to a Quiz Night then I would encourage you to do so. Not only will you have fun, but you will also better understand the local culture. The Quiz Night is a popular British event and it can be hosted at the pub, at school or even at the office. The Brits love these events and there are people who attend them regularly and become quite the experts.

Our Charity Quiz Night was hosted in a bar and many other business colleagues were invited. Of course at these events there is often little food, but lots of drink, in particular pints of bitter. So after having grabbed our pints, Eva and I sat at a table. If you don’t know the other people on your team well, and especially if they are business colleagues, it can be quite embarrassing to show your lack of general knowledge! The two of us, being Italian and American, immediately told our quiz mates that we would not contribute a great deal to the answers that had anything to do with Britain. The Quiz Master, who can either hold this role for fun or for a living, is the host of the event and he or she sets the tone. The questions, generally categorised under 10 different topics, can be very tricky. The “Knights of FOCUS”, that’s what we decided to call our team, used a combination of knowledge, guesswork and luck to answer over 100 questions. Surprisingly enough, Eva’s American culture came in handy with a few of them and my Italian/Latin knowledge helped us to answer some obscure questions.

The best part is checking the opponent team’s answers, so there is no way of cheating! Also we could not use our smart phones (which I suppose many people do) as there was no reception in the room! The two tables next to ours were doing quite well, and it was really fun to compete against them. In between the different lots of questions there is time for chit chatting and this is really when you have the opportunity to get to know people on your team. Again, be prepared for lots of drinking and loud comments and don’t feel badly if you don’t know many answers. We came fifth, so overall we did our “bella figura”. Remember Quiz Nights are often for charity, for fun and for meeting new people and if you also get to understand the questions and answer a few them then you are well on your way to becoming a local!

P.S. the answer to the James Bond question is 5 but to get the first answer you’ll have to do some research or go to a Quiz Night! Enjoy!

By Alessandra Gnudi

Visit the FOCUS website: www.focus-info.org