ortsz

Questions:

1. Which event, which occurred a little over ten years ago and is commonly known by a short date-based abbreviation, is estimated to have cost over 300 billion US dollars?
2. The original Team Fortress was a mod for which video game?
3. True or false: in 1986, US warplanes mistook an undersea shoal near Sicily for a Libyan submarine and dropped depth charges on it.
4. The Treaty of Windsor, signed in 1386 and still in effect today, is an alliance between England and which other country?
5. The name of which global policy think tank is derived from the phrase ‘research and development’?
6. Dyspnea is the technical term for what?
7. Which of the following vegetables does not belong to the Solanum genus: eggplants, potatoes, tomatoes, or turnips?
8. Is cocoroco: a Bolivian beverage with an extremely high alcohol content, a Bolivian dance in which a woman throws her handkerchief on the floor and her partner retrieves it with his mouth, a single-string Bolivian percussion instrument of African origin, a Bolivian indigenous people who mainly grow cassava, or an 18th century architectural style also known as “late baroque”?

Answers:

1. Y2K (not 9/11; the vast majority of the cost was spent in preparation prior to the year 2000).
2. Quake.
3. True.
4. Portugal.
5. RAND Corporation.
6. Shortness of breath.
7. Turnips.
8. A beverage. (The dance described is the Brazilian carimbó and the instrument is the berimbau; the architectural style is rococo.)