Round 2 Second Half

Transylvania University Academic Tournament

Feb. 12, 2000

1.

The failure of what crop led to the Irish famine of the late 1840s?
Answer: the potato

2.

Who encountered the burning bush?
Answer: Moses

3.

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing his theory of what?
Answer: the photoelectric effect

4.

What has been reduced in a difficult to understand sentence like ``The horse raced past the barn fell''?
Answer: the relative pronoun

5.

Find the mode of the following set of numbers: 12, 27, 90, 35, 12, 90, 24, 37, 90, 12, 35, 90, 37, 35.
Answer: 90

6.

Other than the nucleus, what organelle in animals contains DNA?
Answer: mitochondria

7.

Who wrote the lines If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you?
Answer: Rudyard Kipling

8.

The concentration camp known as Auschwitz-Belsen may be found today i n what country?
Answer: Poland

9.

Although the data from this is, by law, confidential, the US government used it to determine the locations of Japanese-Americans in 1940 in order to intern them.
Answer: The Census

10.

State the slope-intercept equation of the line containing the points (2,5) and (8,23).
Answer: y = 3x - 1 (y equals three x minus one)

11.

Composer Claude Debussy is associated with what musical and artistic movement?
Answer: impressionism

12.

In an address in 1900 to the International Congress of Mathematicians, this man outlined 23 major mathematical problems to be studied in the twentieth century. In his first problem, his views on the continuum hypothesis were later overturned by Godel. Name this man.
Answer: (David) Hilbert

13.

What kingdom includes yeast?
Answer: Fungi

14.

In the comic strip Peanuts, where did Snoopy come from?
Answer: the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm

15.

In Peanuts today, what is the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm?
Answer: a parking lot

16.

What mythical Irish hero name means ``Hound of Cullan?''
Answer: Cuchulain (coo-hoo'lin)

17.

Who was the U.S. president when Fidel Castro came to power?
Answer: Dwight D. Eisenhower

18.

Who immediately preceded Mikhail Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union?
Answer: Konstantin Chernenko

19.

A rectangle has dimensions 14 meters by 48 meters. A circle is circumscribed about the rectangle. What is the radius of the circle?
Answer: 25 meters

20.

Who is alleged to have said, ``How many divisions does the Pope have?''
Answer: Joseph Stalin

21.

What is the extract formed by the mixing of warm water with the germinated grain after beer has been malted?
Answer: wort

22.

In the novel Of Human Bondage, what physical deformity did the main character possess?
Answer: he was club-footed

23.

What does D stand for in Roman numerals?
Answer: 500

24.

What name is given to a mapping or function that is both an injection and a surjection?
Answer: bijection

25.

What deposits of carbonate protrude from the cave floor?
Answer: Stalagmites

26.

In an atom, what are the electrons in the outermost energy levels called?
Answer: Valence electrons

27.

Which state in the USA leads in the production of apples?
Answer: Washington

28.

The title of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury is taken from a quote in which Shakespeare play?
Answer: Macbeth

29.

This question requires multiple answers. Earth's atomosphere is made up primarily of what three gasses?
Answer: nitrogen, oxygen and argon

30.

The angles in a quadrilateral are in the ratio of 4 to 4 to 4 to 3. What is the measure of the smallest angle?
Answer: 72 degrees

31.

What ship was the first to use the distress signal ``S.O.S.''?
Answer: Titanic

32.

What is the logarithm base 25 of 1/125?
Answer: -3/2

33.

Which planet is most commonly identified as the ``evening star''?
Answer: Venus

34.

This artistic style attempts to create the fidelity of a photograph through art. Often, artists will actually project a photo onto a canvas and paint over it. What is this style?
Answer: photo-realism or new realism

35.

According to the Bible, what is the root of all evil?
Answer: The love of money. NOTE: Money is not an acceptable answer.

36.

Facing toward the prow of a boat, what is the right side called?
Answer: Starboard

37.

According to Freud, what mental process determines behavior?
Answer: the unconscious

38.

What famous early modern philosopher is famous for having argued that ``je pense, donc je suis'' (or ``I think, therefore I am.'')?
Answer: Rene Descartes

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39.

Which angle between zero and $2*\pi$ (read: two pi) radians maximizes the product of sine squared and secant and cotangent?
Answer: pi over 2

40.

In billions of years, approximately how old is the planet Earth?
Answer: 4.5 billion; accept four or five billion