Podcast Script

Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here.

We’re talking through Match Day 18 from season 107, and this one is very “name heavy” – country names, town names, brand-y nicknames, and even a tiny three-letter TV institution. As always, if you want links, maps, videos, or deeper dives, all the study notes are waiting for you at llstudyguide.com. Think of this as your quick audio walkthrough, and the website as your deep reference library.

Let’s jump in with Question 1.

Question 1 asked: “In 2024, what Southeast Asian country officially began moving some government functions to its future new capital Nusantara, starting the transition away from the city which has served as capital since its independence in 1945 (and prior to that during its Japanese occupation and Dutch colonial period)?”

The answer is: Indonesia.

So Indonesia is in the middle of this huge, long-term project to move its capital from Jakarta to a brand new planned city called Nusantara. Nusantara is being built in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. The legal backbone for this is the 2022 State Capital Act, which basically says, “Nusantara will be the new capital, and here’s how we’re going to move government functions there.”

Jakarta has been the capital since Indonesian independence was proclaimed there in August 1945. Under Dutch colonial rule, the city was called Batavia, then during the Japanese occupation it took on the name Jakarta, and that stuck when independence came. Today, Jakarta is overcrowded, heavily polluted, and literally sinking, because of groundwater overuse and sea level rise. That environmental crisis is the big justification for building Nusantara.

From a quiz perspective, here’s what you want to lock in: Nusantara equals Indonesia’s planned new capital city, on Borneo. Jakarta equals the old and current capital, on Java, and it used to be called Batavia.

If you follow climate change or megacity stories, this one will keep coming up. You’ll see pieces about “sinking cities,” about Jakarta’s flooding, and about the ecological costs of clearing land in Borneo. Those are great adjacent topics to keep an eye on.

A couple of good connections to build into your mental web: First, modern capital relocations in general: things like Brazil moving its capital to Brasília, or Nigeria moving to Abuja, or Egypt’s new administrative capital near Cairo. Nusantara is part of that pattern of countries creating planned capitals. Second, climate and urban planning: articles about Jakarta’s subsidence and sea walls almost always mention the Nusantara move as the supposed solution. That means even if you’re not reading about Indonesia specifically, you can still pick up this nugget indirectly.

If you want maps, timelines, and articles about Jakarta’s sinking and the politics around Nusantara, check the study notes on our website.

Alright, on to Question 2.

Question 2 said: “What town on the River Thames in England, home to the Royal Regatta, lent its name to the collarless shirt with a short buttoned placket that provided ideal ventilation for rowers? Today it’s a menswear staple as a casual T-shirt alternative, undershirt, or layering piece.”

The answer is: Henley – as in Henley-on-Thames.

So this is a nice lifestyle and geography crossover. Henley-on-Thames is a town on the River Thames west of London. It’s famous for the Henley Royal Regatta, a major rowing event that dates back to the 1830s. Rowers there traditionally wore a specific type of shirt: collarless, with a round neck, and a short vertical buttoned placket at the front. Over time, that style took the town’s name and became the “Henley shirt.”

Originally, Henleys were basically underwear or sportswear for rowers. In the twentieth century, especially with designers like Ralph Lauren, they were reimagined as a casual wardrobe staple. Today, a Henley is that collarless knit top with two or three buttons at the neck, often worn as a T-shirt alternative or as a layering piece.

For pattern recognition, here’s the key: fashion terms that come from places. You have the Henley from Henley-on-Thames, the cardigan from the Earl of Cardigan, the Balaclava from the Battle of Balaclava, the Chelsea boot from London’s Chelsea, Oxford and Derby shoes from English towns, and so on. If a clothing item sounds like a place name or a surname, it often is.

Adjacent learning ideas here: One, rowing culture and geography. The Henley Royal Regatta is a big deal in that world. If you saw The Social Network, the Winklevoss twins race at Henley. That scene is a great pop culture hook tying the regatta to the town. Two, menswear vocabulary. Knowing what a Henley shirt looks like, versus a polo, versus a crew neck, can help you with description-based questions: “collarless shirt with a short placket” should trigger Henley.

For a quick visual sense of the town and the shirt, plus how fashion marketing tells the origin story, check the study notes on our site.

Let’s move to Question 3, which takes us to American history and geography.

Question 3 asked: “French fur traders in the late 1700s encountered a river they called Roche Jaune. This river eventually gave its name to a roughly 3,500-square-mile region of the U.S. that was formally designated in 1872 as the first of its kind in the world. What is this area named?”

The answer is: Yellowstone National Park.

Here’s the chain: Indigenous Hidatsa people had a name for the river that roughly translates as “Yellow Rock River.” French trappers in the region rendered that as Roche Jaune, which literally means “Yellow Rock” or “Yellow Stone.” In English, it became the Yellowstone River. Then, when the U.S. government set aside a huge area around the river in 1872, that land became Yellowstone National Park, about 3,472 square miles, which matches the “roughly 3,500” in the question.

Yellowstone is widely considered the world’s first national park, and it set the template for the whole national park system. It straddles Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and it’s famous for geysers like Old Faithful, hot springs, wildlife, and the massive volcanic caldera.

For quiz purposes, a couple of hooks: If you see “Roche Jaune” or “Yellow Rock” in a historical French context in the American West, think Yellowstone. If you see “first national park,” especially with an 1872 date or Ulysses S. Grant, that’s also Yellowstone.

Adjacent topics that help reinforce this: One, pop culture references. Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park is explicitly a play on Yellowstone. The modern Yellowstone TV franchise uses the name repeatedly, even though it’s centered on a ranch. Those references keep the name floating in your head. Two, the national park movement. Ken Burns’s documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea spends a lot of time on Yellowstone as the origin story. Once you know that, any “first national park” question should feel very familiar.

If you’d like timelines of the park’s creation, maps, and some nice satellite imagery that really shows the scale, those are all in the show notes on the website.

Now, Question 4 shifts to business and economics, with one of those catchy finance nicknames.

Question 4 said: “In 2023, Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett coined what phrase, derived from a classic 1960 Western, to refer collectively to the influential tech stocks with the ticker symbols AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, META, MSFT, NVDA, and TSLA?”

The answer is: the Magnificent Seven.

This is about a group nickname for seven giant U.S. tech or tech-adjacent stocks: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. In 2023, they were so dominant in terms of returns and index weight that Michael Hartnett, a strategist at Bank of America, started referring to them as the “Magnificent Seven,” riffing on the 1960 Western film of the same name.

The movie The Magnificent Seven is itself a Western remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. In the film, seven gunfighters are hired to defend a village. In financial media, that imagery becomes seven big guns holding up the stock market.

This kind of branding sticks. Before this, you might remember “FAANG” or “FANG” for a subset of big tech stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. Now we’ve moved on to a new acronym-free cluster name.

From a pattern standpoint, there are two things to train on: One, finance loves catchy group names: FAANG, BRICS, the Asian Tigers, the Four Dragons, the Nifty Fifty, and now the Magnificent Seven. If you see a list of big tech stocks in a question, think about whether there’s a known nickname attached. Two, pop culture titles used as metaphors in news coverage. Film and TV phrases like “House of Cards,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Magnificent Seven” often get recycled in headlines or analyst reports.

If you want a recap of which exact tickers are in the group, and some sample charts showing their weight in the S&P 500, check the study notes on the site. It’s useful to be able to rattle off those seven companies quickly.

On to Question 5, which is about language and dictionaries.

Question 5 asked: “‘To ornament (metal or other surface) by inlaying or encrusting it with stones or gems’ is one of the many definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary for what word, which had a Guinness-record 430 separate definitions in the OED’s 1989 version?”

The answer is: set.

This is a classic bit of word trivia. In the 1989 second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “set” held the record for the most meanings of any English word. Guinness World Records cites it with 430 separate senses for the bare verb, and the full entry runs around 60,000 words once you add all the phrasal verbs and idioms.

One of those senses is specifically in jewelry and metalworking: to set a stone in metal, meaning to fix a gem into a setting, or, as the question puts it, “to ornament metal or another surface by inlaying or encrusting it with stones or gems.”

But of course, you know dozens of other uses: set the table, set an alarm, set a bone, a film set, a tennis set, a math set, sunset, mindset. That’s polysemy in action: one word form with a ton of related meanings.

A couple of helpful angles here: First, when a question name-drops Guinness World Records and the OED, and asks for a common English word with tons of meanings, “set” should be at the very top of your list, with “run” as another big one in modern discussions. Second, this is part of a broader pattern about language records: longest word, most meanings, longest dictionary entry. Those pop up a lot in trivia.

Adjacent learning topics you might explore: One, polysemy more generally. “Set,” “run,” and “put” are textbook examples. Articles about how “run” has now overtaken “set” in some counts will often restate the old statistics for “set,” reinforcing both words for you. Two, word-oddity collections. If you like lists of strange English records – longest palindromes, weird plurals, words with lots of homophones – that same reading will keep throwing “set” in your path.

The study notes on the website collect some of these references so you can skim them quickly and lock in that Guinness fact: “set,” 430 meanings, OED 1989.

Finally, Question 6 brings us into television and music.

Question 6 said: “Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of [BLANK] Music is a documentary directed by Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and Oz Rodriguez that premiered on NBC in January 2025. What three letters fill in the blank?”

The answer is: S N L – SNL.

So the full title is Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music. This is a three-hour documentary special that aired on NBC in January 2025, directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez. It looks back at five decades of musical performances on Saturday Night Live.

SNL has always been a hybrid show: sketch comedy plus a musical guest every week. Over 50 years, that’s an incredible archive: everyone from early punk bands, to hip-hop acts getting their first mainstream exposure, to huge pop stars. The documentary pulls together some of the most memorable and influential musical moments from the show’s history.

Questlove already had a big documentary hit with Summer of Soul, so his name attached to this project got a lot of critical attention. NBC promoted the special heavily as part of its broader SNL 50th anniversary celebration, with next-day streaming on Peacock. If you follow entertainment news, you probably saw that title in articles and promos.

From a quiz pattern standpoint, notice how solidly three-letter brands like SNL or MTV can stand in for longer show names. Once something is iconic enough, those three letters become the whole identity. That makes it a very natural target for fill-in-the-blank questions.

Some adjacent topics to keep in mind: One, milestone TV anniversaries. Big round numbers – 25th, 40th, 50th seasons – often come with specials and documentaries. Knowing that SNL hit 50 years in the mid-2020s is useful context. Two, Questlove as a director, not just a musician. His documentary work – Summer of Soul and now this SNL music retrospective – is starting to form its own little quiz niche.

If you’re curious which performances made it into the documentary, or you want a list of the eras and artists it highlights, check the detailed notes on our website.

So, to recap the six anchors from this match day: Indonesia and its new capital Nusantara. Henley-on-Thames and the Henley shirt. Yellowstone National Park as the first national park, named via Roche Jaune and the Yellowstone River. The Magnificent Seven tech stocks dominating financial headlines. The ultra-polysemous little word “set.” And SNL as a three-letter cultural giant, celebrated in 50 Years of SNL Music.

If you build little mental hooks that connect each of these to things you already know – climate and megacities, rowing and fashion, national parks and cartoons, tech stocks and Westerns, word trivia, and TV documentaries – they stop being one-off facts and start becoming part of a web you can quickly navigate during future matches.

Remember, everything we just talked through is backed up with links, visuals, and extra examples in the study notes at llstudyguide.com. Use those when you have a few minutes to sit with a topic and really cement it.

Thanks for listening today. Come back for the next match day review, and we’ll keep turning those tricky questions into familiar territory, one episode at a time.