In case I don't have enough fun projects to distract me from the more practical items on my things-I-need-to-do list, the King William's College general knowledge paper has returned. King William's College is a prep school (not a "college" in the American sense) on the Isle of Man. What KWC calls the "general knowledge paper" is a yearly tradition better known to many in Britain and elsewhere as the world's hardest trivia quiz.

The quiz is presented to the students as a test on their last day before winter break. No one is expected to get many answers right sight unseen. The same test is presented again after the break, the idea being that students (or perhaps their parents) will over the holiday try to find the answers and commit them sufficiently to memory. The quiz is thus designed to test research skills as much as knowledge or memory.

Nowadays the skill being tested is creative Googling as much as anything. I recall only a couple of questions where we found the answer in offline sources. Even before the Internet, the quizmaster would carefully draft the questions as cryptic clues so that they couldn't be looked up so easily. In the age of Google that task must be even harder.

Two years ago, Benzene was one of two blogs I know of whose participants chased down all the answers. Last year at around Christmastime I looked for the quiz online, but I couldn't find it. (I wondered then if perhaps KWC had elected to cease publication of it, possibly due to blogs like Benzene spoiling the test by making all 180 answers readily available with just one bit of not-so-creative Googling.) This year I had forgotten all about it, but this morning I got an email from my mother with the links. I see no mention of non-publication last year either in the Guardian article or on KWC's website. Maybe I was looking for it too early in the year.

I'm not sure I'll find the time to pursue this as comprehensively as I did two years ago, but I'll at least set up a forum in case my readers want to pursue it. I've still got my HTML page from last time, so it should be pretty easy to strip out all the old answers and start filling in the new. The URL will be the same as four years ago. Until a few minutes ago it still pointed to the 2004 answers. I've just rearranged it to point to a rudimentary index directing you to any year. As I write this, the 2006 page isn't up yet, but once it is, that's where it'll be.

If you want to play, you'll have more fun if you read the questions first and look at our answers only afterward. (My answer page doesn't show the questions, so you'll need a copy from elsewhere anyway.) For a printable (and more accurate) copy of the questions, get the PDF directly from KWC.

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