Oxford Fiesta

Written by Katie Dunn and Catherine Wu

Answer: STONE

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We’re first told that questions are pyramidal. For any Quizbowl enthusiasts, this should look familiar. However, the clues seem a bit off. With judicious googling and a few helpful unlocks, we eventually submit a partial answer (for example, "THIS AMERICAN LIFE") and are given the prompt “THIS AMERICAN LIFE is on the right track!” Once we’ve identified a few more clues, we can determine that all the answer lines are before-and-afters (see this Jeopardy category). This is also clued by the title, with Oxford and Ford Fiesta as the before-and-afters. The answers to all the warm-up round questions and what the clues mean are as follows:

Warm-up round answers

AnswerBefore explanationAfter explanation
IS THIS AMERICAN LIFE
  1. The android has a vision problem, looks at a bed of tulips in a subsequent frame, and holds an encyclopedia in his left hand
  2. The meme template is used to confuse various objects to comedic effect.
  3. The meme is viral. The speaker is a brave fighter, and the original butterfly is confused with a pigeon.
  4. The meme template is of someone who wears glasses and confuses the identity of a butterfly.
  1. The radio show won a prize for investigating the impact of the 'Remain in Mexico' policy.
  2. Each episode begins with a journalistic theme that links multiple acts
  3. The program has over two million listeners and won a Pulitzer.
  4. Ira Glass hosts the radio show.
CROSSOVERWATCH
  1. It occurs between non-sister chromatids when a cell splits twice (meiosis).
  2. Barbara Mcclintock won the Nobel Prize, partly for demonstrating crossover with an experiment using a knob at one end of a chromatid.
  3. Crossover was first proposed by Thomas Morgan when working with fruit flies, and is part of recombination.
  4. Crossing over switches alleles between chromosomes.
  1. Winston is a genetically engineered gorilla. Other heroes have ultimate abilities like Meteor Strike and Supercharger.
  2. The game has over thirty heroes.
  3. Heroes in the game have passive and active skills.
  4. The game is developed by Blizzard, and players fight in squads of six.
DARK MATTERHORN
  1. One theory is that dark matter is made of exotic particles, but its nature is still unknown.
  2. Dark matter explains inconsistencies in galaxy rotations.
  3. The MACHO and WIMP are two candidates for dark matter.
  4. Dark matter can't be observed, and accounts for 27% of the universe.
  1. There was a competition in the 1860s to reach the peak of Matterhorn, and 4 of 7 people died on the descent.
  2. The ride was inspired by Matterhorn, a European mountain.
  3. The ride uses bobsleds (also in the name).
  4. The roller coaster is in Disneyland.
2007 WONDERS
  1. The iPhone (which uses the finger) was announced in January.
  2. Daniel Day-Lewis is the only person to receive three Best Actor awards. His second was awarded for a 2007 movie.
  3. McCain and Obama ran in the 2008 election, "a year later".
  4. The iPhone was announced, and Putin was named Person of the Year in 2007.
  1. Players can borrow neighbors' resources by paying 2 coins.
  2. The game has three ages.
  3. 7 Wonders Duel was developed for two players.
  4. 7 Wonders is a card-drafting game that takes up to 7 players.
BOY BANDWAGON EFFECT
  1. One Direction was created on The X Factor, a TV show.
  2. Boy bands dance and sing.
  3. BTS and One Direction are boy bands.
  4. A boy band is a musical group.
  1. The term "bandwagon" was first coined during Zachary Taylor's campaign.
  2. The bandwagon effect can invert the demand curve, as the more people who want a good, the more desirable it is.
  3. FOMO is one cause of the bandwagon effect.
  4. Jumping off a cliff is a common adage about the bandwagon effect.
JOAN OF ARCSIN
  1. Joan of Arc claimed to hear voices at 13.
  2. The March to Reims occurred after the Siege of Orleans.
  3. The Bastard of Orleans is named Jean D'Orleans.
  4. Joan of Arc was a teenage heroine burned at the stake.
  1. arcsin(0) = 0
  2. arcsin peaks at pi/2.
  3. arcsin can be confused with cosecant, as both are "inverses" of sine.
  4. The trigonometric inverse did not commit any "sin"s.

The diagram below the warm-up questions suggests we take the overlapped word in each answer. Each column is a three-word crossword clue: THIS OVER MATTER and 7 BAND ARC. The answers are MIND and RAINBOW, respectively. READING completes the before-and-after and therefore is the answer to the warm-up round.

This unlocks the main round, where partials are no longer confirmed. In addition to making ID more difficult, this also obscures the fact that answers are now composed of three joined phrases, instead of two.

Main round answers

Answer Extracted Word
HELLO WORLD WIDE WEB DUBOIS HELLO KITTY CORNER STONE
MO HAWK EYE OF THE TIGER HAWK
GEORGE WASHINGTON POST MALONE POST OFFICE
BLANK SPACE RACE FOR THE GALAXY SPACE
PITCH PERFECT NUMBER OF THE BEAST PERFECT FOURTH WALL
REAL ESTATE TAXIDERMY ESTATE
US OPEN SESAME OIL SESAME STREET
THE RED AND THE BLACK SEA URCHIN URCHIN

With the diagram, we deduce that we need to repeat the warm-up round extraction, with tournament style match-ups. In the main round, there is no middle word in each of the answers, and the word to extract is instead determined by the “for X points” in the final clue. We take the word at index X for the tournament bracket, which can then be filled in as above to give us STONE as the final answer.

Author's Notes

We came up with this idea (unsurprisingly) while playing through a Quizbowl packet after encountering “Winter is Coming of Age in Samoa”.

One of the hardest parts to get right when writing this puzzle was mimicking the feel of a pyramidal question. The point unlock structure made it so that teams couldn't unlock all the clues at once, and we later added the capability of time unlocks to let teams who were stuck to progress. (Huge thanks to Brian Shimanuki for all the work it took to implement this puzzle!) We hope some teams chose to optimize for fun, and still tried to solve early even with an excess of points.

Some answer lines we couldn't include due to the extraction constraints included:

  • Name this period of economic hardship that started in Macedonia and overthrew the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great Depression
  • Name this professional organization that includes the Dodgers and a famous Mozart work for beginners that repeats itself four times in a work by Joseph Heller. Sonata in C Major Major Major Major League Baseball
  • What novel by Chinua Achebe describes how pre-colonial life causes bright copper kettles to rust and warm woolen mittens to unravel. My Favorite Things Fall Apart