Film

This match day leans heavily on 20th‑century media and institutions: the first televised Major League Baseball game in 1939, a German chocolate brand defined by its square bar, the financial performance metric alpha, a 1994 action blockbuster, two long‑running Newport music festivals, and U.S. presidents’ congressional careers. Q1 and Q4 both sit at the intersection of sports, news, and entertainment: the Dodgers–Reds game at Ebbets Field on August 26, 1939 is widely recognized as the first Major League Baseball game ever televised, while Speed (1994) — promoted with a tagline about rush hour — reached U.S. theaters just days before the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase turned Los Angeles freeways into wall‑to‑wall live TV. ...

This match day pulls you through a wide sweep of topics: a Latin legal‑financial term (pro rata), a contemporary blockbuster video game franchise (Monster Hunter), 19th‑century imperial Brazil’s early adoption of the telephone, cinema sound branding (THX’s Deep Note), classic Heian‑period Japanese literature (The Pillow Book), and comparative military institutions (West Point, Sandhurst, Saint‑Cyr). Pro rata is a Latin phrase meaning “in proportion,” widely used in law and finance to describe distributions such as dividends according to each holder’s share of the whole.1 The Monster Hunter series is Capcom’s long‑running action role‑playing franchise, with Monster Hunter Wilds (2025) becoming the fastest‑selling title in company history, outperforming earlier hits Monster Hunter: World (2018) and Monster Hunter Rise (2021). ...

This match day ranges widely: from Indian religious practice and European Christian theater to color theory, auteur cinema, scandalous French literature, and the chemistry of anesthetics. The opening question on mantra draws on Hindu and Buddhist meditation traditions, where sacred syllables like Om are repeatedly chanted as potent tools for focus and spiritual power.1 The Oberammergau question then jumps to a very different kind of religious performance—the Passion Play that the Bavarian village vowed to stage every ten years after a 1633 plague outbreak, first performed in 1634 and still mounted on a decennial rhythm.2 Meanwhile, the color‑theory problem tests applied physics and design: in both additive RGB light mixing and subtractive CMY/CMYK printing, cyan sits opposite red, so red and cyan together cancel to neutral (white in light, dark/black in print), giving maximum contrast.3 ...

This match day ranges widely across space and time, but it has a strong spine of European history and culture running through the early questions, anchored by a Reformation‑era assembly on the Rhine, the mountain backbone of Italy, and the shock‑tactic art of Britain’s 1990s Young British Artists.[^1][^2][^3] You then pivot into how ideas and stories are packaged and sold—through Allen Lane’s cheap, high‑quality Penguin paperbacks and Cameron Crowe’s grunge‑era film Singles that made a real Seattle apartment building at 1820 E. Thomas St. into a Gen‑X cultural touchstone.[^4][^5] ...