How are the people on University Challenge so knowledgeable?

Easy. Just watch Starter for Ten

I looked it up and it sounds good.


Then I saw they had an 8m budget with only 1m return
OH ****!


Still, great reviews, I'll see it tomorrow.

I am watching UC now and it strikes me how they can answer really difficult questions. How did they become like that?

The questions in each subject area are not that difficult if you're a confident and enthusiastic student at university level, which the candidates are. They just sound hard to people who aren't in that environment - whether because they're still at school, or have interests in other areas, or are in work and not in the habit of studying anymore.

My partner and I like to sit and try to score as well as the teams (we don't manage it, because neither of us are scientists - but it's fun). The microbiology questions sound like goobledy-gook to us, but I imagine they're mostly set at first- or second-year degree level in terms of content, and can be worked out fairly straightforwardly if you have the foundation knowledge and a bit of natural ability. Similarly, some of the humanities questions may sound ridiculously obscure or difficult to a scientist, but if you're emersed in a humanities background, the bits of knowledge you have on various subjects tend to fuse together and allow you to at least make an educated guess - which is a big part of the University Challenge technique. We get the literature questions, most of the geography and modern history and music, and my partner gets quite a few Classics questions because he's good at Latin.

How does it work when one individual can answer questions from a range of topics? I would understand if we had universities in Britain that offer broad courses similar to those in the US, but that isn't really the case. We specialise very early here in the UK where you can drop a great deal of subjects even at the age of 16.

Also, how does that explain such questions on classical music?

Well, educated people who like studying tend to have a curiosity about many things, and so pick up lots of bits of information, which those blessed with good memories manage to retain. They don't tend to be interested only in what they do as part of school or university curriculum, but range outside of those constraints.

My partner and I listen to classical music a lot, and have done ever since we were teenagers, so it's not difficult to identity most UC snippets (they tend to use the most famous section of any given piece, anyway).

I have in the past been all right at making educated guesses in some pure maths questions, because I had a flirtation with pure math in my late teens. I'm not so hot on it now - I've forgotten most of it. But at 19 I was all right, despite being an English student. I doubt I'd be capable of doing a maths degree, but that's another matter.

You seem to start quite a lot of threads asking how people become knowledgable, and how knowledgable is considered truly knowledgable. Surely it's quite obvious that acquiring knowledge involves being both intellectually curious (which provides the motivation to find things out) and having a reasonably good memory.

It's because whenever I watch UC I often ask myself whether they are knowledgeable due to the way they are (they are able to retain a lot of information easily) or whether it's just through effort (making the effort to learn about other things). Because many people are knowledgeable, but not up to UC standard.

It's because whenever I watch UC I often ask myself whether they are knowledgeable due to the way they are (they are able to retain a lot of information easily) or whether it's just through effort (making the effort to learn about other things). Because many people are knowledgeable, but not up to UC standard.

It's both. But the difference between UC and the average pub quiz is that UC questions try to get you to *think* as well as just *know*; which is where ability takes over from simply retaining facts.

The questions in each subject area are not that difficult if you're a confident and enthusiastic student at university level, which the candidates are. They just sound hard to people who aren't in that environment - whether because they're still at school, or have interests in other areas, or are in work and not in the habit of studying anymore.

My partner and I like to sit and try to score as well as the teams (we don't manage it, because neither of us are scientists - but it's fun). The microbiology questions sound like goobledy-gook to us, but I imagine they're mostly set at first- or second-year degree level in terms of content, and can be worked out fairly straightforwardly if you have the foundation knowledge and a bit of natural ability. Similarly, some of the humanities questions may sound ridiculously obscure or difficult to a scientist, but if you're emersed in a humanities background, the bits of knowledge you have on various subjects tend to fuse together and allow you to at least make an educated guess - which is a big part of the University Challenge technique. We get the literature questions, most of the geography and modern history and music, and my partner gets quite a few Classics questions because he's good at Latin.

It's both. But the difference between UC and the average pub quiz is that UC questions try to get you to *think* as well as just *know*; which is where ability takes over from simply retaining facts.

What do you mean by that? Surely it's a matter of knowing who built what or what happen in 1857 in Paris?

Yes you have to know things, but the questions are often phrased in such a way that you have to use some lateral thinking to get to the answer. Where a pub quiz might ask 'Which architect re-designed Paris in the 19th century?', a UC question would be more like: 'What monument links a poem by Victor Hugo, the architect who renovated 19th century Paris, and funeral of John F. Kennedy?', which requires various bits of knowledge *plus* the intelligence to make connections between them.

Actually you are exactly right. That example question is virtually how many UC questions are phrased.

What I don't get is how do you get the ability to know a bit of everything and then make connections between them?

For example, how am I supposed to know what happened in Kennedy's funeral? Or who redesigned 19th century Paris? Why would I know these things?

Seems like today's education system produces a lot of teenagers who know **** all about general knowledge.

Well, firstly nobody would get that general knowledge from school alone - these people are nerds! It's what happens to you if reading and learning is your hobby and passion, rather than just something you have to do at school.

As for that question (which I just made up), it doesn't require you to know all the separate answers to the bits of the question; but they do help to narrow down your potential pool of answers the more you know. If you know that Baron Haussman redesigned central Paris in the 19th century, and you're being asked about a monument, you can take a guess and say Arc de Triomphe, which Haussman made a focal point by designing long, wide avenues leading up to it. Or if you're a literary person you might happen to know that Hugo wrote a poem about the Arc; or if you're a presidential history buff, you'll know that the flame from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, under the Arc, was incorporated into Kennedy's funeral at the request of Jackie, as they both visited the site in 1961. These all allow you to make a judgment on the likely answer, and the more separate answers you know, they less likely you are to guess the wrong thing. However, you could know the answer to each individual question, but if you don't have the intellectual sharpness to make connections between things, you might not get the answer. So it's knowledge plus intelligence, where pub quizzes tend to be just knowledge.

As to how you get to be like that - by being one of life's natural nerdy types, absorbing information all the time, being curious, and having a keen intelligence. This will always be extra-curricular, so the school you go to doesn't really come into it (though obviously some are more supportive than others).

And if you know neither of these three things (like me) then you're kinda stuck, aren't you?

One question I must ask - how do they retain the information they read in books (or is it something that comes naturally)? There's been many times where I've read books and I've forgotten who wrote it, let alone what was in the book itself.