Get Off My Property! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Go

It's unknown when the board game "Go" originated, but it was first mentioned in historical texts dating back to the sixth century BCE, in Confucian annals from the Zhou Dynasty. The legend goes that Emperor Yao needed to control his unruly son, so he invented a mental game which required strategy and focus. From there, Go, or Weiqi in China, spread to Japan and Korea, and it's mentioned in Heian Japanese literary works like "The Tale of Genji" and "The Pillow Book". It took a bit longer to make it to the West, though, not even entering European awareness until the 1700s, and not becoming even close to popular until the twentieth century.

The rules of the game are straightforward, but strategy is complex. One person plays black pieces, another white, on a board where the intersection of grid lines are available spots to play. A playing piece (or "stone") is removed from the board if there are no available "liberties." A liberty is an adjacent unoccupied spot to a chain of stones, all of the same color. Essentially, if a group of pieces of all the same color is surrounded, then they are all removed. The game ends when there are no more places left for valid moves, or both players pass; in that situation, the winner is either the player who controls more area on the board, or the player who has surrounded the most unplayable territory.

Answer: Income tax

The first American income tax was actually introduced during the 1861-1865 Civil War by the North to fund the war, and it was a flat tax (equal percentage paid on income by all people). In fact, the current progressive tax (a tax in which higher earners pay a larger share of their incomes) wasn't introduced until, appropriately enough, the Progressive Era, roughly around the turn of the twentieth century. In the Supreme Court case Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., the Court struck down a progressive income tax as violating the Constitutional requirement that all "direct" taxes must be allotted proportionally to states' populations. In 1913, an amendment was passed granting the federal government the ability to take up a new form of taxation, which did not have to be proportional to population. This essentially negated the impact of the Pollock decision.

Some people still challenge the amendment though. Because Ohio, one of the three-fourths of states required to ratify an amendment, hadn't yet been officially proclaimed a state by the federal government, some argued that the amendment wasn't correctly passed. Others, led by William J. Benson, claim that the amendment is invalid because the version of it passed by the states differed from the national version of the amendment in such important aspects as capitalization and punctuation of various words. There are also accusations that variations of the Sixteenth Amendment, as ratified by the states, were in fact different in their content from what the federal government signed into the Constitution. US Courts of Appeals have found these arguments "legally frivolous" and, effectively, have ignored them.

Answer: Community

"Community", the sitcom, is set at Greendale Community College, and centers on a group of students who semi-accidentally form a Spanish study group and end up becoming close friends as a result of it. It was created by Dan Harmon. One interesting quirk of the show is that titles of episodes are supposed to parody actual college courses; for example, in Season 1, episodes included "Home Economics", "Debate 109", and "The Politics of Human Sexuality".

"Community", the ecological grouping, is defined by Britannica as an "assemblage of interacting populations of the species living within a particular area or habitat". A population is all of the organisms of a particular species living in the habitat, so communities represent all living things in an area. Community ecologists often study symbiosis, all the ways in which populations interact outside of competition and predator-prey cycles.

Answer: Chest

The term "thorax" technically applies to vertebrates, including humans, but it's most often encountered with respect to insects, in reference to their chests. It's the location of the body where the legs and wings attach, and it links the head to the abdomen, which in many species, is the longest section of an insect's body. In some arthropods, the head and the thorax are merged into a cephalothorax: you can see this in horseshoe crabs, where the carapace (a shell) covers that body segment. Insect skeletons are themselves exoskeletons, meaning they lie on the outside of internal organs. These skeletons are made of chitin, a nitrogenous polymer which also makes up the cell walls of fungi.

Because of the unique adaptations of insects, many body parts you'd assume to be on the face are actually present on the thorax. For instance, grasshoppers breathe through spiracles, tiny holes which lie on their legs. The tympanum, the hearing organ that the grasshopper uses, is also on the thorax.

Answer: They're sung in jail.

In "Close Every Door", perhaps the best-known song from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat", Joseph is in jail after he's accused of sleeping with Potiphar's wife. The breathtaking song features the iconic lines, "For I know I shall find/My own peace of mind/For I have been promised/A land of my own."

"The Prologue", the energetic opening number to "Les Mis", sees the prisoners of a Parisian jail lamenting the hopelessness of their lives. During the song, Jean Valjean, who served nineteen years of his twenty year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread, is set free. The song is reworked by low-class workers in the slums of Paris in "Look Down".

In "Betrayed", from the hilarious satire of Broadway, "The Producers", Max Bialystock resents his partner Leo, who has apparently escaped with Ulla, his love, after the "failure" of their successful Broadway play "Springtime for Hitler." In fact, you can pretty much learn the entire plot of the musical from that one song, as Max outlines everything that he did wrong to end up in his situation in his dramatic lament.

"Man of La Mancha", a remake of Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel "Don Quixote" is appropriately set in prison, as Cervantes himself was once captured by Algerian pirates and spent several years as a slave. In the musical, the character Cervantes awaits his trial by the Spanish Inquisition and decides to stage a theatrical version of a story he'd created, one involving an idealistic knight and his reluctant lover, Dulcinea...

Answer: Park

In Manhattan, New York City, avenues run north and south, and streets run west and east. The avenues are numbered First to Thirteenth, though the street numbers end up well over two hundred. The city's laid out in a grid, so it should be easy to find your way around, right? Not necessarily: the avenues from east to west are First, Second, Third, Lexington, Park, Madison, Fifth, Sixth, Broadway (which winds through Manhattan, not parallel to the other avenues), then Seventh, Eighth, and so forth. In fact, Park Avenue was once called Fourth Avenue.

The grid which Manhattan's streets follow was actually first established in 1811, and it has pretty much been unchanged since, other than the addition of Lexington and Madison avenues, the renaming of Fourth Avenue to Park Avenue, and the creation of Central Park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted later in the century.

Answer: "Chance"- by Joseph Conrad

Interestingly, it was the little-known 1913 novel "Chance" which brought Polish-English author Joseph Conrad some of the largest dividends on book sales, not his better-known titles like "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim". Those familiar with "Heart of Darkness" will recognize Marlow, the narrator, as he once more bloviates about one of his lengthy experiences; however, this time, he doesn't reminisce about the mysterious Captain Kurtz, but rather, about a young woman named Flora de Barral.

Writing around the turn of the century ("Heart of Darkness" was published in 1899; "Lord Jim" in 1900), Conrad is often seen as one of the most important precursors to literary Modernism. His use of unreliable narrators, uncharacteristic narrative forms, and imagery often associated with Impressionism, influenced decades of later novelists.

Answer: Utility

Utility is, unscientifically, a measure of how much satisfaction a consumer derives from a good. It is usually shown graphically on an indifference curve, which is downward-sloping and plots one good on the x-axis, and another good on the y-axis. At any point on an indifference curve, the consumer's satisfaction from the combination of the first good and the second good is the same.

The law of diminishing marginal utility (also called Gossen's First Law) states that utility from a good will decrease with each additional good. In economics, marginalism is the principle that consumer preferences derive from the value of "one more" good rather than the total utility. Diamonds are more valuable than water, since having one more diamond is better than having one more drop of water, even though the water is more necessary. However, each additional diamond gives less utility than the one before it, until the diamond no longer provides any more utility at all--the indifference curve flatlines.

Answer: Railroads

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia lagged economically behind both its European and Asian neighbors. It was soundly defeated by Japan in war in 1905, and tensions against the tsar were beginning to rise.

In the 1890s, the Trans-Siberian Railway, a matter of pride as much as an economic necessity, was begun under the suggestion of Sergei Witte, Tsar Nicholas II's trusted economic adviser. Soldiers and prison workers worked from both ends, meeting in the middle so that the line was completely finished by 1916. The Russian Revolution would begin one year later. Today consisting of over 9000 kilometers (more than 5000 miles) of track, running between Moscow in the west and Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan in the east, the Trans-Siberian Railway is one of the longest continuously-operating locomotives in the world.

Answer: Monopoly

During World War II, MI9, the British war intelligence agency, pioneered a novel way to give maps and compasses to Allied prisoners of war. They hid them--inside Monopoly boards. Maps were printed onto silk and hidden inside the games, which German camps distributed to prisoners. According to Victor Watson, whose father Norman was president of Hasbro during the war, it's possible that ten thousand Allied POWs escaped from prison camps, thanks to the board game.

The common bond of the correct answers is that they are all spaces on a Monopoly board (which aren't standard "properties"). You did get off the property! Thanks! The answers to the questions were:

GO
INCOME TAX
COMMUNITY
CHEST
PARK (as in FREE PARKING)
JAIL
CHANCE
UTILITY
RAILROAD