Round 1 Second Half

Transylvania University Academic Tournament

Feb. 12, 2000

1.

He is the author of children's literature such as I am the Cheese, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, and The Chocolate War. Name him.
Answer: Robert Cormier

2.

What was the code name for the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II?
Answer: Operation Overlord

3.

What royal fortress was stormed by Parisians on July 14, 1789?
Answer: The Bastille

4.

This question requires multiple answers. Name all four of the Brothers Karamazov
Answer: Dimitri, Ivan, Aloysha and Smerdyakov

5.

Which was the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the Constitution of the United States?
Answer: Rhode Island

6.

1 inch equals how many centimeters, to 3 significant digits?
Answer: 2.54cm

7.

Cultures in which property is inherited from mother to daughters are called what?
Answer: Matrilineal

8.

What famous physicist produced much of his most significant work while sequestered at a country estate in an effort to escape plague?
Answer: Isaac Newton

9.

Not counting the Apocrypha, how many books are in the Christian Bible?
Answer: 66

10.

Who was Al Gore's freshman roommate at Harvard?
Answer: Tommy Lee Jones

11.

How many covalent bonds can a carbon atom form?
Answer: four

12.

What organelle in a eukaryotic cell is essential for the process of aerobic respiration?
Answer: mitochondrion (plural: mitochondria)

13.

Name the site in New Mexico that has given its name to an ice-age native American culture, famous for its type of spearhead?
Answer: Clovis

14.

How many seating arrangements are possible for a circular table with seven people?
Answer: 720

15.

Solve for x: x²+5x=2x+21 (x squared plus five x equals two x plus 21).
Answer: x=-7, 4 (x equals negative seven and four)

16.

This question requires multiple answers. What two Picasso paintings were stolen from a Zurich art gallery in 1991 and again in 1994?
Answer: Seated Woman and Christ of Montmartre

17.

Who was the ``Sun King''?
Answer: Louis XIV of France

18.

Consider two objects. The first has a mass of m and a velocity of v. The second has twice the mass and one-half of the velocity. What is the ratio of the momentum of the first to the momentum of the second?
Answer: 1

19.

Who wrote War and Peace?
Answer: Leo-or Lev-Tolstoy

20.

Bob can paint a fence in six hours. Joe can paint the same fence in four hours. How many hours will it take the two of them to paint the fence if they work together?
Answer: 2.4 (hours) (or 12/5 hours)

21.

Who was the President of Germany when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor?
Answer: Paul von Hindenburg

22.

What literary character said ``It is a far, far better thing I do , than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.'' ?
Answer: Sidney Carton

23.

What is the technical name for a bean pod?
Answer: legume

24.

What computer pioneer invented the cow-catcher for trains?
Answer: Charles Babbage

25.

Which ancient Greek philosopher is credited with the famous remark to the effect that ``one can't step into the same river twice''?
Answer: Heraclitus

26.

Why are there no longer A or B-sized batteries?
Answer: These large batteries became obsolete as devices became smaller

27.

What is the term used to mean alternate forms of the same gene?
Answer: alleles

28.

Find the slope of the line containing the points (23,37) and (-9,73)
Answer: .

-9/8

29.

How many US presidents have been assassinated?
Answer: Four

30.

Archimedes and Tsu Chung-Chi were able to put bounds on its value over 1500 years ago. Lambert proved that it was irrational. Lindeman proved that it is transendental. In 1967 a CSC 6600 computer calculated it to 500,000 decimal places; now it is known to over 10 billion decimal places. What is it?
Answer: $\pi$ (pi)

31.

Who was the 1st presidnt to lose re-election?
Answer: John Adams (to Thomas Jefferson)

32.

Consider all rectangles with perimeter 44 meters. What is the area of the largest such rectangle?
Answer: 121 square meters

33.

What kind of rock is sandstone classified as?
Answer: sedimentary OR depositional

34.

What Italian philosopher was burned at the stake in 1600 for, among other things, pantheism?
Answer: Giordano Bruno

35.

Round to the nearest megabytes, 56,780,250 bytes.
Answer: 56 megabytes

36.

What kinds of cells form new bone tissue?
Answer: osteoblasts

37.

In what general region was wheat first domesticated?
Answer: Count as correct any one of the following three: the Fertile Crescent, the Middle East, the Near East.

38.

What pamphlet did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write in 1848?
Answer: The Communist Manifesto

39.

Longtime lover and companion to Jean-Paul Sartre, she was also a highly influential philosopher of existentialism and feminism. What is her name?
Answer: Simone de Beauvoir

40.

What is the logarithm base 256 of 32?
Answer: 5/8