On Monday I went to Trivia Night at the Leafe since a couple of old teammates were looking for someone to add to their trivia team. Since I don’t get out much, I gave it a shot. Overall, it was pretty fun, though it got off to a late start and got rowdier as the night went on. Unfortunately, there were a few people on other teams slouched in their seats with a Blackberry or iPhone under their table trying to Google the answers after they were read out at the beginning of each round. Cheaters.
The questions were hard — about Jeopardy-level difficulty. There were seven rounds of ten questions, each round having its own category. The categories included general knowledge, sports, geography, celebrity identification, music, and people whose names started with “John.” A few of them I was able to get on my own, such as “What is the identifier for the interstate that stretches from Boston, MA to Seattle, WA?” I’d been to both ends of I-90: Logan airport and Safeco Field, but oddly have never driven any stretch of it, so I knew that one. The “famous Johns” category wasn’t too bad, my teammates were good with the sports, and we did well identifying countries on a map on the geography part. We didn’t have a clue for the two music categories though.
One of the general knowledge questions asked: “What country has the lowest divorce rate?” I remember we talked about this for a bit, and decided on Vatican City. At the end of the round when we turned in our sheets, the girl running the show announced the answer: Italy. We were pretty upset by this one, so we walked up and protested, but got shot down.
The girl’s first retort to our protest was that the Vatican is a microstate and not a country. According to Wikipedia, the Vatican is a sovereign city-state (microstate), with “city-state” defined as an independent country with a small population or land area. This means that all city-states/microstates are countries, but not all countries are city-states. I don’t think the argument could be any clearer: the Vatican is a country.
After trying to argue the definition of the term “country”, the organizer then tried to block us from a different angle. She said that since the Vatican doesn’t issue marriage licenses, the divorce rate “doesn’t exist”, so it wouldn’t count as a correct answer. This isn’t true, either, for the Vatican does issue marriage licenses.
As for the divorce rate “not existing”, this doesn’t make any sense. For example, in my research I am working on an event detection scheme and calculate the false positive rate of event detection for a given time period. False positives occur when the scheme believes an event occurred but in truth, nothing did. It is possible that no events truthfully occur during some period, but that doesn’t mean that the false positive rate doesn’t exist and should be thrown out: it’s just zero. The same goes for divorce rates: if divorces are illegal or don’t occur, then the divorce rate is zero.
Regardless, Brazil and Sri Lanka have lower divorce rates than Italy, so the answer provided wasn’t even right to begin with.
Recent Comments