What makes a good quiz question? Rather than answer that straight away, first we'll consider the slightly easier question of what makes a bad one. Once that is out of the way we will move onto attributes of a good question in another blog.
The easiest type of bad question to recognise is the one that is plain wrong. In another post we have mentioned one of the most enduring of these; namely, what is the only Football Club mentioned in the Bible? The popular answer is Queen of the South, but Arsenal, Bury and Reading all appear, and using a small (but not excessive) amount of licence Hull is in there too, without the City. With a bit more of a stretch Spurs, Wolves, Hearts and Palace are also to be found.
Another dire type of question is one with multiple answers, but with only one of the answers listed. An example of this - Which is the only British city named after a saint? Before reading on consider the answer you would be most likely to give.
The answer on the sheet was St. Albans, but several teams had answered St. David's (and this was before St. Asaph became a city). It's probable that the person setting the question had conflated British and English - a common error in many quizzes, sad to say. This realisation did nothing to pacify the Welsh contingent that were present, especially when the question master stuck to "the answer on the sheet is the answer, even if it's wrong".
That's not to say that all questions with more than one possible answer are always poor questions. It's just that they all need to be listed. The second highest mountain in the world is most commonly known as K2, so make that the answer, but also list the five other names under "Also accept". Then the person who knows its Tibetan name gets to show off, and there's no row!
The final flawed question is the one that is unanswerable. Many good questions have answers that few people would know, but are reasonably easily guessed with a bit of thought. No, we mean something like "Which was the first town in the USA to get all its water through desalination?" Honestly, one of the team has been asked that in a quiz.
So that's the bad ones - in part 2 we'll consider the good ones.
In the meantime feel free to comment with your "favourite" bad questions.