It is not like India don’t have good fast bowlers but when they start playing, they started loosing their pace. How many times we have seen it? Munaf Patel, first name comes in your mind. Then Irfan Pathan, Ishan Sharma, Praveen Kumar…almost every fast bowler.

Why is it happening that they can’t maintain their pace? It is not happening with bowlers from other countries. Currently Zaheer is only real pace bowler. What will happen after him? We can see how bad bowling was without him in England tour.

West Indian pace legend Michael Holding says, Indians need to look at diet for pace.
“There is nothing wrong with their technique. If you don’t take care of what you are eating, then you are bound to lose your strength”

Really? What do you think? 

Education is the key

Ignorance can cause destruction

Ignorance can cause abuse of a substance

Ignorance can render a useful material useless

The antidote for ignorance is education

If you educate a person, you have solved half of a problem

Education is a continuous process to improve and train mental faculties

Yesterday’s knowledge may not be enough for you today

Therefore, seek knowledge and wisdom

Continuously read to gain

Education is the key

Remember the world is moving at a fast pace in terms of information and technology

Learn more my brother

Learn more my sister

Be educated

Be informed and catch up!

Quizbowl

It goes by many names. The most common are quiz bowl, scholastic bowl, scholars’ bowl or just quiz team. Then there are the regional names, based on local television shows attempting to capitalize on the public’s love of “Jeopardy” and other game shows. Examples of this include “It’s Academic,” or “It’s Ac” for short, in the greater D.C. area and “Battle of the Brains” in Virginia. Whatever you call it, quizbowl follows the same principles everywhere: gather high school and college students (usually) who enjoy competition and love knowledge of academic subjects. The result is a nation-wide subculture that has thrived in the last decade. Whether you are a student looking for an exciting extra-curricular activity or you have a friend that is a member of this subculture, this article will explain the idea behind quizbowl, the people involved in quizbowl and the rules of the game.

The Idea

The theory behind so-called “good quizbowl” is that “tossup” questions will decide which individual in the room has the greatest depth of knowledge in the subject area of the question. A tossup therefore is usually at least four lines long and begins with the deepest information, the facts that will lead only the most knowledgeable student to the answer. The rest of the tossup includes progressively more accessible clues until the final line, or giveaway, allows at least one person on the average team to answer correctly. In most forms of quizbowl, the individual who answered the tossup earns a “bonus” question or set of questions for the team. On bonus questions, unlike tossups, the team may confer among themselves about the answer, allowing the questions to be a little more difficult than tossups. Bonuses usually consist of three parts in which one part is more accessible and one part is less accessible than the third part. This allows scoring systems to distinguish teams based on depth of knowledge in the subject area of the bonus.

Examples of Questions

A tossup in a tournament I attended (ACF Regionals 2009) provides an example:

This author wrote about an aged woman who tells stories about Danko, who tears his heart from his chest in a forest, and Larra, who becomes unable to die after killing a young girl, in “Old Izergil.” This author’s first play focuses on the expelled student Pyotr and his sister Tanya, who are oppressed by their father Vassily. Besides that play, which is variously translated as The Petty Bourgeois and The Philistines, this author wrote a play about the truth-telling Bubnov and the locksmith Kleshch, which is set in a boarding house run by Vassilissa and the landlord Kostylyov. For 10 points, name this Russian author who pioneered socialist realism in his novel Mother and wrote The Lower Depths.

ANSWER: Maxim Gorky [or Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov]

Here, the description of “Old Izergil” is only accessible to those players deeply familiar with the work of Maxim Gorky. On the other hand, Mother and Lower Depths are his two most recognizable works, and these titles appear in the giveaway. For reference, this tournament was at the standard college level and occurred early in the Spring of 2009.

Here is a bonus written for JV high school teams from a tournament I co-developed and co-edited (HAVOC II)”

This work’s sequel No Longer At Ease details the life of the protagonist’s grandson. FTPE:

[10] Name this novel in which Okonkwo kills his son Nwoye’s friend Ikemefuna to avoid being seen as weak by the Umuofia clan.

            A: Things Fall Apart

[10] This Nigerian author of Arrow of God wrote Things Fall Apart.

            A: Chinua Achebe

[10] This other Nigerian author is known for the plays The Lion and the Jewel and Death and the King’s Horseman.

            A: Wole Soyinka

In this case, the first part serves as the “hard part” because the player must give the name of Achebe’s novel given only a description and not the author’s name. Then Achebe himself is the “easy part” because Things Fall Apart is a recognizable title of his. The “middle part” of this bonus comes last in Wole Soyinka, a slightly more challenging author, off his two best-known works.

The Players and Companies

The quizbowl subculture consists of two groups: the players and the companies. An interesting feature of quizbowl, though, is the overlap between these groups. Players come from high schools and colleges across the country. Some of the high schools with continually successful programs include:

• Maggie Walker Governor’s School in Richmond, VA
• Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA
• State College High School in State College, PA
• Hunter High School in New York City, NY
• Dorman High School in Spartanburg, SC

Competitive College programs include:

• Harvard University
• University of Minnesota
• University of Chicago
• Brown University
• University of Maryland – College Park

At the high school level, two companies produce questions used at regular season tournaments. Each of these companies as well as a third writes and manages an annual tournament to decide the national champion.

• NAQT – By far the largest question-writing company, NAQT consists mostly of former players at the college level. They write questions that are meant to be accessible to the widest variety of students and therefore have the largest national tournament, bringing in more than 100 teams to Chicago each Spring.
• HSAPQ – The youngest of the major companies, HSAPQ is an organization mostly made up of current college students who believe NAQT’s products often suffer from the age of writers. While NAQT has since taken steps to prevent this, HSAPQ remains the company most receptive to the active quizbowl community. HSAPQ offers a different sort of national tournament in that teams consist of a state’s “all-star” team and can therefore have players from different schools.
• PACE – PACE does not write regular season tournaments, but it manages the more exclusive national tournament. PACE NSC (the name of that tournament) offers more challenging questions than NAQT’s HSNCT (the other nationals) and tends to focus more on academics by removing popular culture questions.

At the college level, NAQT continues to have wide support and offers one of two national tournaments:

• NAQT – College-level NAQT tournaments have separate divisions based on Undergraduate status and nationals experience. NAQT also runs qualifying tournaments earlier in the school year called Sectionals.
• ACF – ACF is an organization of current and recent college and graduate students that offers an alternative to NAQT with slightly longer questions and greater transparency. ACF’s tournaments include a Fall event followed by ACF Winter and Regionals before the Nationals competition, all of which are packet-submission, meaning teams each write a round of questions that will be their bye rounds at the tournament. Editorship falls to ACF members who are not playing and is considered a great honor in the community.

The Rules

Each of the above companies, as well as the many schools that write questions for local tournaments, tend to have slight variations in rules. HSAPQ even writes for some states’ high school leagues and therefore uses multiple formats. I will try to explain the most common formats.

NAQT often uses timing for each half of the round, with different timings for each level of play. The other formats are generally untimed. In all formats, there are varying rules as to how long a team has to answer bonuses, how long after hitting a buzzer a player has to answer the tossup and how long after the tossup has been read before moving on to the next tossup.

Tossups are often ten points when answered correctly. When a tossup is answered incorrectly, the answering team is often penalized with a loss of five points; PACE, for example, does not have a penalty for incorrect answers. In all the common formats, each team may answer a tossup only once, so an incorrect answer leaves the rest of the question for the opposing team. If a tossup is answered sufficiently early, some formats allow for a “power.” In NAQT tournaments, a power gives fifteen points instead of the usual ten, while PACE awards twenty points for early answers. Bonuses usually add up to thirty points, with each of the usual three parts worth ten.

Sites to Visit

The following site has the best information on quizbowl available online: HSQB.

These sites contain archives of quizbowl questions useful for practice:

*quizbowlpackets.com

*carloangiuli.com/acfdb

*Stanford Packet Archive

We do not have just one role in our life, all our roles inter-link and thus makes us who we are. Each role comes with its own set of challenges, how we manage the challenges is how much stress we accumulate.

Here are some easy to follow tips to control your stress level.

Prioritise

Sometimes it feels that you have too many pots on the stove and they are all going to boil at the same time. That being the case, you have to know which pot you have put on the stove first, BUT at the same time, you must know which will take a shorter cooking time (hmm, this is beginning to sound like a cooking class! Sorry about that). Sounds complicated, and it is. Some jobs need to be attended first, either due to date-lines or that your child is waiting impatiently for you!

Pace yourself

Don’t take on too many responsibilities, sounds selfish right, but it’s true. If you have too many obligations, you will find it difficult to fulfil some of them. This will cause you stress as you try to do too many things. People that you try to help will be disappointed with you, they may not know the full picture, but that doesn’t stop them from feeling that you let them down.

Share your woes with a friend

When the stress gets too much for you, talking about it to your friend will be a great help. As you discuss the areas of stress, your friends can help you identify what the causes are and they can help you eliminate the stress or at least offer some suggestions how to reduce the stress.

Take a day off

It does work. Sometimes, being bogged down by too much stress from the same area, you need to just step away from it all and give it a rest. Have a good break, recharge! Many people are afraid to take this step, as they feel guilty that they are not trying hard enough. Then when you come back to the problem, you may see it from a different angle.

Laughter

The cup is half empty or the cup is half full. Taking a positive outlook in each situation is a better choice and make you a happier person. Being angry and upset all the time doesn’t make the stress go away. However, with laughter, at least you bring joy to others around you as well as being healthier (something to do with the chemicals floating around in your system! I will try to do an article on that some other time).

Write it down

Sit down in front of your computer or pen and paper/diary if you prefer and pour it all out! You will be amazed by how much stress you are putting yourself through for sometimes inconsequential things or even get stress over things that you cannot control (like the number of readers coming to read my articles!) Better still write an article for Triond and de-stress.

Reflect

You must know yourself. Take time to reflect on your behaviour and what are the triggers that will help you control or lose control of your stress level. Don’t be in self-denial, not now. The more you know yourself, the better you can have control over your stress and change your behaviour for the better. Many people are afraid to take this step as well, as they fear they may not like the person they see in themselves. Don’t worry, if you can see the faults in yourself, that is the first step in your reflection. The next step is to change the behaviour.

Remember, Rome was not built in one day. Take one step at a time and see the change in yourself and be a happier person!

Good luck. You can do it!