Saturday, 24 March 2012
University Challenge - Grand Final
Manchester University v. Pembroke College, Cambridge
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Luke Kelly increased his team’s lead with the words iconic and ironic. Quotations bonuses followed, and I was saddened to see Manchester fail to identify my favourite poem , Keats’ Ode to Autumn. They took the other two, though. Ben Pugh took another flyer on the next and lost five, allowing Luke Kelly in with the term Steampunk for a genre of Science Fiction set in worlds where things are run on clockwork mechanisms – something like that anyway. Was this the decisive break for Manchester ? Bonuses followed on Toki Pona – see below – and Manchester managed one of these. They weren’t steaming ahead, but then it was never that type of match. The hardy perennial Planets Suite provided the music starter, and Michael McKenna was first in to identify Mercury – good shout there, I thought. Now, this was the final, and so for the bonuses they had to identify the planet, but also its largest moon. Only Mars and Phobos fell to them. Ben Pugh stopped the rot with the next starter. We’ve had the acronym BRIC before – was it last series or the previous one ? – and he knew that we were dealing with brazil – Russia – India – China. Bonuses on plant cytology provoked wry smiles between the team members, and two passes and an incorrect answer were the result. Ben Pugh took his second in a row with the Swedish chemist Berzelius. Psychological experiments brought them two bonuses, and narrowed the gap to 55 points. This time it was Luke Kelly who twitched on the buzzer, on a set of cryptic clues to Bali, which lost Manchester 5, bringing them back below 100, and allowed Ed Bankes to supply the correct answer. Bonuses on angles followed. I was really pleased with myself for remembering the angle of incidence. Pembroke didn’t manage to add to their store with this bonus. Luke Kelly took back those 5 points and more besides with the next starter on the term Civil Society. Manchester’s bonuses on volcanoes allowed them to add another 10 points. The gap now stood at 60 – not insurmountable by any stretch of the imagination, but it was looking like a large gap in this match considering that we had now reached the 20 minute mark.
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Interesting Fact Of The Week That I Didn’t Already Know
Toki Pona is an experimental language created in 2001 – it has no letter B
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https://lifeaftermastermind.blogspot.com/2012/03/university-challenge-grand-final_24.html
