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Go in-depth on Bloomberg's games, Pointed and Alphadots, with quizmaster Aimee Lucido.
Go in-depth on Bloomberg's games, Pointed and Alphadots, with quizmaster Aimee Lucido.
Go in-depth on Bloomberg's games, Pointed and Alphadots, with quizmaster Aimee Lucido.
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Hello, Point-dexters!
I'm your Quizmaster, Aimee Lucido, and the new Pointed quiz is live! Categories include markets, the Fed and tunnels. Check it out here.
But first, Alphadots this week is by Bloomberg's very own Adam Aaronson. My favorite clue/answer combo of the week is [Tour de France?] -> EIFFEL TOWER because every time I see this clue I do a double take. Is "tour" really how you spell the French word for tower? Is it really called the "Tour" de France? How has no one made this connection before??
Play Alphadots
Our daily word puzzle with a plot twist.
Today's clue: Figure formed by the stars?
Play now!
Back to Pointed...
Pretty good overall last week with a few stand-out toughies keeping the average from being too high.
One of my editors had their money on the Khaby Lame question as being the hardest of the week, and while it was hard (49%), there were two that played quite a bit harder. One was the question about the Nigerian coup (33%) and one was the...
Hardest Question of the Week
Shipments of the namesake drink of a certain region of France have fallen to their lowest level since 2009. In response, an industry group ordered makers to cut their output of eau-de-vie per hectare to half of what they produced four years ago. Which region is it?
- Champagne
- Bordeaux
- Absinthe
- Cognac
The first answer we expected you to rule out was absinthe, which isn't named for a region of France. The next clue we hoped you'd pick up on was "eau-de-vie," which is something uniquely connected with brandy and other spirits. That rules out Champagne and Bordeaux leaving just Cognac as the correct answer. We'd suggest the 68% of you that missed this one drown your sorrows in some cognac but it seems the general public is losing interest in that pursuit.
Trivia From Outside the News Cycle
At the office this week there was a German chocolate cake on offer, which triggered a conversation about things that sound like they're named for one thing but are actually named for people (German chocolate cake has nothing to do with Germany and everything to do with chocolate maker Samuel German). Brown noise is another example of this phenomenon. Which "Brown" is Brown noise named for?
Oh, and here's the answer to last week's Trivia From Outside the News Cycle question. The question was: "What shell-shape cookie (well, really shell-shaped cake) appears in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" The answer is... madeleine. The madeleine episode in the book is famous, and used to show how a food can trigger an involuntary memory. I recently had something like that - but without food - when we were editing a question about Gap and my editor asked, half-jokingly, if Gap would ever make a video game. I was suddenly seized by a twenty-year-old memory of playing the Gap Kids Quest Snow Day PC game as a kid, which I was obviously expert at.
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