Pravega 2014: Students test their science skills in Science Quizine

The first of the two grand quizzing events of Pravega, the Science Quizine culminated yesterday with a great round of enthusiasm and appreciation from both the participants as well as the audience. The resplendent contest took place in the J.N. Tata Auditorium, the prelims commencing from 10 am in the morning and the hall teeming with quizzing enthusiasts varying in age group from high school students to graduates along a distribution of around fifty to sixty participating teams, each team having a maximum of three contestants.

The preliminary round of the quizzing began with quiz master Basavaraj Talawar, known to most as BT, presenting twenty challenging questions on the screen one after the other. Participants had to write the answer on a sheet provided to them. It was a wonderful scene thenceforth, seeing everybody chattering to his or her teammates about probable answers to twenty targets of recognition. Few questions were eemingly memory-based at first sight, yet it was only later when the answers were finally released that most of the teams could gather a feel for the ingenuity and assiduity of the contributors to the creation of the quiz and the systematic arrangement of various notions that the questions pertained to.

The questions in the prelims themselves were widely distributed over the concepts and applications ofscience so as to capture the attention of even the masters of the fields,though all in all, they revered the spirit of the history of science and technology, the great innovations that have been given to the world by great minds working over all themes ranging from technical mathematics to comic strips to hardcore biochemistry.

The Finals were, to be true, even more intriguing than the prelims. Six teams were taken in the finals for five rounds of engaging quizzing. The first and the last were pouncing rounds, the second and the fourth were buzzer rounds, and the most ‘fashionable' was indeed the third round called ‘Poker'. The latter composed of betting, just the way in actual poker, on the answers to the number of questions a team knew. Questions in the finals, as anticipated, were far more demanding than the prelims, yet the teams that eventually won showed a great fervour in answering almost all questions. The first team was awarded a satiating prize of eight thousand rupees.