KQA History Quiz Seek under Porus 2012, prelims with answers

SeeK under Porus

4th Edition of KQA History Quiz

1
In February 2012, it was reported that United
States Marine Corps scout snipers had been using
this device to symbolize their function since at least
the 1980s. It was adopted from the indigenous
Germanic character which originally symbolized the
sun. This simple but striking device consisted of
two letters side by side like lightning bolts. This
device became so popular in Nazi Germany that
typewriters had an extra key so that one can print
this character with one key stroke instead of two.
What?

2
One of the major changes in the Indian army
post independence was the dropping of a term
which is derived from a Persian word meaning
army for a Persian word meaning young. The
first term is preferred by the British historians to
denote an event in Indian History while India
historians generally don't use it. What was the
change?

• Sepoys came to be referred to as Jawans

3*
His father Umar Sheikh Mirza died in a freak
accident. An avid pigeon flyer, he lost his life
when his dovecot built on the edge of a ravine
in the corner of the castle tumbled down into
the depths below in a landslide carrying him
along with it. "Umar Sheikh Mirza, flew with his
pigeons and their house and became a falcon"
wrote his son in his memoir, considered the first
of it’s kind in the Islamic World. Who?

• Babur writing about his father in Baburnama

4
Which war fought in the period of 1917-23 had
the belligerents grouped as white, green, red and
black?

5
This ancient Sumerian city is now within an
American Air Base in Iraq. In 1999, Saddam
Hussein denied Pope John Paul II access to the
site, which is supposedly the birthplace of
Abraham. Which City also famous for this
massive structure?

• Ur, the picture is of Ziggurat of Ur

6
In 2010 this comic journalist visited India to do
a long form feature on rural poverty. The
community he chose to study was the
musahars, the traditional rat catchers of North
India. He went to a historical town in UP to do
the research and named the resulting work after
it. Name the comic and also explain the town’s
historical relevance. Pic

Joe Sacco named his comic, Kushinagar which
also the place where Buddha attained
Parinirvana

7
It was this Tamizh scholar who collected and
published Tamizh Sangam era classics. Thus
starting with Jeevaka Chintamani in 1887, he
printed and published Manimekalai
(1888), Silappathikaram (1889), Paththupaattu
(1889) and Purananooru (1894), all appended
with scholarly commentaries. Who? What
nickname did he get because of these efforts?
<pic>

• U. V. Swaminatha Iyer
• He was called affectionately called the Tamizh
Thatha

8
Excerpt from a 1924 article titled "Shall We All
Commit Suicide?" : " …..Could not explosives
even of the existing type be guided automatically
in flying machines by wireless or other
rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless
procession over a hostile city, arsenal, camp or
dockyard?" Words of someone who claimed
that he could pass an examination on H.G.
Wells's works. Who and what present day
menace did he imagine at that time?

• Churchill on Drone Warfare

9
In USSR the term "vrag naroda" was used to at
various times applied, in particular, to Tsar
Nicholas II and the Imperial
family, aristocrats, the
bourgeoisie, clerics, businessmen, anarchists, kul
aks, monarchists, Mensheviks, Bundists, Trotskyi
sts, Bukharinists etc. What similar term was in
vogue in the States during 1930's?

• Public Enemy, vrag naroda means enemy of the
state in Russian

10
It was described as, "The pearl in the necklace
of the forts of Hind". This place is also famous
for the last stand of Rani Lakshmibhai. The
discovery of a tablet recording the establishment
of a small 9th century Hindu temple in the fort
generated a lot of interest as it was the oldest
recorded evidence of something. Id the fort
and also What did they find here?

• The Gwalior Fort
• The oldest record of 0 for which a date can be
assigned was found in that tablet

11
The Central Institute of Psychiatry in Ranchi is
probably the oldest lunatic asylum in Asia. Two
inmates of this hospital were released as a
goodwill gesture in 2003. This was right after
when PM Atal Behari Vajpayee visited a
neighboring country. They have been inmates of
this institution under special status for 42 years.
One of these inmates suffered briefly from
schizophrenia but otherwise both of them were
healthy. Who are these people?

The inmates were Yang Chen and Shih
Liang, two PRC soldiers who were held as
POWs in India. Vajpayee had gone to China and
had met Wen Jiabao.

12

It states that if equilateral triangles are
constructed on the sides of any triangle, either
all outward, or all inward, the centres of those
equilateral triangles themselves form an
equilateral triangle. What theorem? <pic>

• Napoleon Bonaparte was a amateur
mathematician and this sort of a geometric
construction is called a Napoleon Triangle and
the statement is called Napoleon’s theorem.

13
During the World War Two, it is believed that
there was an informal agreement between the
Germans and the Allies that the Allies won’t
bomb the German towns of Göttingen and
Heidelberg in return for sparing two English
towns. One strong evidence pointing in this
direction is the unearthing of some German
plans to make one of these cities the capital of
Occupied England. Name Hitler’s English
capital.

14

The library of the Archeological Department of
the Delhi is named after the man who
commissioned it. It was his Persian translation
of Upanishads that attracted Sir William
Jones, the father of Indology, to Upanishads.
His life has inspired many works of fiction one
of the most popular is shown below. Many
historians consider his failure as a great “if
moment” in India’s history. Who? <pic>

Dara Shikoh. The heir apparent to Shahjahan, it
was by defeating him that Aurangazeb ascended
the throne of Delhi.

15

ID this band named after the key witness in
District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's prosecution
of Manson and his followers for the Tate-
LaBianca murders

• Kasabian named after Linda Kasabian

All of these animals are named after A.O.
Hume
• Hume’s Warbler
• The Manipur Bush Rat (Hadromys humei)
• Hume’s Argali

17
The painting depicts the quaestor of Sicily
discovering a famous tomb. The quaestor (sort
of a Roman consul), had heard the locals speak
of this tomb, but none of them knew the exact
location. Name both the quaestor (a famous
man in his own right) and the man who’s tomb
was discovered. <pic>

• Cicero discovering Archemedes’ grave.
• The tomb has the famous sphere inscribed
within a cylinder.

18*
Located in modern day Poland, the Malbrok
Castle (or Marienburg Castle) is a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. It is said to be the largest
castle in the world by surface area. It was built
by a particular group after their conquest of Old
Prussia in the 13th century. Name the specific
group that built it.

• The Teutonic Knights (The Order of Brothers of
the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem).

19*
This Jesuit priest was the
confessor of Louis XIV. In
1804, the city of Paris
bought a plot of land
where he had once lived.
The plot was converted
into something that bears
his name. Today it is the
largest of its kind within
the city and attracts
hundreds of thousands of
visitors. What ?

• The confessor was Pere Francois de La Chaise.
• The Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is named
after him.

20
“My client is not in a hurry” – Famous response
by a man when asked about the duration of his
celebrated project. He had worked on it from
1883 to 1926 and left it unfinished at his death.
What was he talking about ?

Antoni Gaudi, Sagrada Familia.

21
He had attended the AICC meeting in 1928. Thirty
years later, he visited India again. He describes a
meeting thus: “Dark, cold eyes looked at me
without feeling. Thirty years before, he and his
father had been introduced to me at a huge rally for
independence. I mentioned this to him, but it
produced no change in his face. He replied in
monosyllables to everything I said, scrutinizing me
with his steady, cold eyes.”
Who about whom?

22
What specific incident was the subject of this cartoon ?

“They salute with both hands now”

• “Night of the Long Knives” (Hitler’s purge of
the SA / “Roehm Putsch”).

23.

• Who is being commemorated in this stamp ?

• Casey Jones, a railroad engineer, who was the
only casualty of the “Cannonball express”
collision.

24*
When the Athenians were voting on whom to ostracize, to send
into exile for ten years, by writing names on potsherds, an
illiterate farmer who did not know ___ asked him to write a
name down for him on his piece of pottery. _____ asked him
what name to write, and the farmer replied “_____". He
dutifully wrote his own name, and then asked the farmer what
harm _____ had ever done him. "None at all," came the
reply, "but I'm sick and tired of hearing him being called 'the
Just' all the time. Name this “strategos” of Athens, who was
recalled from his exile later and played a key role in the defeat of
the Persian invasion.

25.
An artist’s re-creation of a famous structure in its ancient glory.
Identify the structure.

26.
In August 1943, an 18 year old soldier named Charles
Herman Kuhl got diagnosed with a case of
psychoneurosis. He had repeatedly returned from the
battle front with similar issues and was admitted to the
15th infantry hospital. Although his soldierly career was
somewhat unspectacular, he became famous during his
illness. In fact, he may well have influenced one of the
crucial decisions of the war. Explain.

• Charles Herman Kuhl was the victim of the infamous “Patton
slap”.
• During a visit to the hospital, General Patton was enraged when
he found Kuhl, who had no apparent wounds, sitting in the
hospital. He accused him of cowardice and slapped him. There
was public pressure on Eisenhower to take action. It may have
been one of the contributing factors for Patton not receiving a
command during the first phase of Normandy landings.

27
The cartoon mocks a
1901 ideology, that was
added on as a corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine.
What diplomacy ?

• Big Stick Diplomacy, as proposed by Theodore
Roosevelt.
• “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go
far.”

28.
• According to the popular story, the idea was born
when the Congress leader Kamaraj was at a train
intersection near the town of Cheranmahadevi in
Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. As he was waiting
for a train to pass, he noticed young boys tending to
their goats and cattle. He asked one small boy, “What
are you doing with the cows? Why didn’t you go to
school?”. The boy’s response made Kamaraj think, and
he went back and started a new program to attract kids
like him to school. What did Kamaraj do?

• started the Mid-day meal scheme.

29.
• During his tenure at the Government mint in
Calcutta, he reformed weights and
measures, introduced a uniform coinage and devised a
balance so delicate as to indicate the three-thousandth
part of a grain. A gifted architect, he rebuilt the minaret
of Aurangzeb in Benares and improved the drainage
system of Calcutta by building a tunnel between the
Hooghly river and the Sunderbans mangrove forest.
The ghat shown below was erected in his honor by the
citizens of Calcutta. Who?

• James Prinsep, more famous for deciphering the
Brahmi script and the rock edicts of Ashoka.
• The Prinsep Ghat in Kolkatta was built in his
honour.

30*
This castle in Rotherham, Yorkshire, was built in the
1770s. The Earl who built it named it after a place to
show his support to the activists who were protesting
against the English. So strong was his opposition to the
Government position that he resigned his commission.
Quite cheekily, he also banned a particular beverage
from parties held at the castle . Name the castle. <pic>

• Boston Castle.
• Tea drinking is banned here.

31
• The Society of American Travel Writers conducts the annual
Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for outstanding
print, online and multimedia works and for travel photography.
The awards are named after Lowell Thomas, an American writer
and broadcaster who had a distinguished career at CBS and NBC
radio networks. Thomas traveled all over the world and made
interesting broadcasts. But he shot into the limelight through
exhibitions of dramatic video footage that he shot over a short
period of time in 1917. The subject of his films received world
wide fame due to his exhibitions. Who/What are we talking
about?

• Lawrence of Arabia.
• Lowell Thomas was the man who made Lawrence of
Arabia famous. He made several recordings of
Lawrence attired in his Arab dress and engaged in his
desert war.

32
• From the 17th century into the 19th century, the area was known
to the British as the "Pirate Coast", as raiders based there harassed
the shipping industry despite navies patrolling the area. The British
often led campaigns against the pirate bases along the coast. Raids
continued intermittently until 1835, when the rulers agreed not to
engage in hostilities at sea. In 1853, they signed a treaty with the
United Kingdom. The independent territories which signed the
agreement were called "___", after this treaty. They were declared
as British protectorates. In 1971, Britain ended this agreement and
the territories joined together to form a single nation. By what
name were these protectorates known till 1971?

• The sheikdoms were called “The Trucial States” after an
agreement under which they agreed to a "perpetual maritime
truce“. In 1971, they became a confederation known as the
UAE.

33*

• Identify the person, portrayed on the cover of this book.

• Roger Casement, the Irish revolutionary who was also a
campaigner for human rights in Congo and Peru. The cover is
from the Mario Vargas Llosa work “The Dream of the Celt”

34
• X = Hebrew word for German.
• Y = Hebrew word for Spanish.
• X and Y together form the two main
subcultures of a particular group. What words ?

• X=Ashkenazi
• Y=Sephardi.
• These are the two main subcultures of Judaism.

35*
• This building in Tangier, Morocco is the first property
acquired abroad by its owners. It is also the only ______
on foreign soil. Name the building or fill in the blanks.

• The American Legation in Tangier is the first property acquired
by the United States Government outside the country.
• It is also the only National Historic Landmark on foreign soil.

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