Check out the prelims of the annual business quiz at Pragati 2020- the management fest of ASB Coimbatore (Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore) hosted by Dhanraj B for Quiz Cetera. You can top the prelims at 14 points
2. Presented by
Quiz Cetera
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100+ quizzes across
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Aniruddha Mitra
p15aniruddham@iima.ac.in
9426310784
Dhanraj B.
p14dhanrajb@iima.ac.in
8123955150
Minakhi Misra
p13minakhipm@iima.ac.in
9998154540
Tauseef Warsi
p14tauseefw@iima.ac.in
8691045534
3. Rules
2 members per team
Top 6 teams will qualify for the Finals
Written prelims
25 questions
1 point per correct answer
Part points wherever applicable
Inbuilt tie-breaker (* marked questions will be treated as tie breakers)
Any unethical practices will lead to immediate disqualification
Mobile phone use is banned during the quiz
Quiz master’s decisions will be final
5. 1. What is the inspiration for the cover design ?
6. 2. Which app?
In late 2019, The New York Times contacted Apple and Google with its investigation
about a messaging app, which the newspaper claimed is used secretly by the
Emirati government to track every conversation, movement, relationship,
appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones. Within
weeks, following their own investigations, both companies removed the app from
their respective app stores.
The app, released mid-2019, was billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video
or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted
popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype. While the majority of its
users are in the Emirates, the app surged to become one of the most downloaded
social apps in the United States by the time it was removed from the app stores.
Huawei had also promoted the app in its own campaigns and created some
confusion back home since the name was similar to another popular Chinese app.
7. 3. What reason?
Every year winter brings in news reports of a certain reason leading to
hiring issues in New Delhi/NCR with newspaper and magazine stories
about people refusing to accept offers and looking to move out of the
city.
In a 17,000 response survey by LocalCircles, 40% of respondents
claimed they would like to move out due to the said reason.
According to a World Health Organization research, this issue costs the
global economy $225 billion each year in lost labor income.
8. 4. What is X?
X is an over-the-top (OTT) platform from an Indian mass media
company headquartered in Chennai. The OTT platform has recently
tied up with Reliance Jio. The OTT platform initiative has been headed
by the daughter of the Group promoter who was present at the recent
IPL bidding.
9. 5*. What broke the record?
The operation in early October 2017 following the collapse of Monarch
Airlines was the UK's biggest ever post-war repatriation with 110,000
passengers stranded overseas repatriated. What September 2019
incident broke that record?
10. 6. Fill in the Blank
The ______ Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1919, as a joint
venture of Walchand Hirachand along with Narottam Morarjee,
Kilachand Devchand and Lallubhai Samaldas all of them businessmen
from Gujarat. To start the company, Walchand Hirachand, and others
bought the SS Loyalty in 1919 from the Gwalior royal family. The vessel
was originally the RMS Empress of India (1890) bought from the
Canadian Pacific Railway and paid for by the Maharaja of Gwalior as a
hospital ship for Indian troops in the First World War. The company was
recognised as the first Swadeshi shipping company in the true sense of
the term and was referred to widely in Mahatma Gandhi’s columns in
Young India and Harijan.
12. 7. Which company/brand?
The American company that manufactures audio equipment was
founded by James Bullough Lansing who was an American audio
engineer and loudspeaker designer in 1946. Their first products were
the model D101 15-inch loudspeaker and the model D175 high-
frequency driver. The 1970s saw the company become a household
brand, starting with the famous L-100 model.
Today it is owned by Harman International Industries, a subsidiary of
South Korean company Samsung Electronics.
13. 8. Which book?
It is a 1987 book that is part memoir and part business-advice that
reached number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there
for 13 weeks, and altogether held a position on the list for 48 weeks.
One of the co-authors who claims to have ghostwritten the whole book
has been self-critical even saying he had "put lipstick on a pig.“
The other co-author replied to criticism with “He didn’t write the book,
I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1
best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some
say it was the best-selling business book ever.”
14. 9. How did this ad create news/controversy
outside the TV Screens?
The Vivo V17 Pro advertisement created by Dentsu Impact features
Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan and a little girl in an amusement park
where the said mobile phone is used for clicking pictures under
different settings.
16. 10*. What is the Aldi-Äquator?
Brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht officially founded the German grocery
chain Aldi in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II.
The ″Aldi-Äquator″ runs from the Rhine via Mülheim an der Ruhr,
Wermelskirchen, Marburg, Siegen, and Gießen east to just north of
Fulda.
17. 11. Identify the companies
The Big 6- Six large firms dominated the sale of seeds and agricultural
chemicals up to 2017 in the United States and around the world: BASF,
Bayer, Monsanto, X, Y and Z.
The estimated $130 billion merger of X and Y closed on August 31,
2017.
Bayer acquired Monsanto for an estimated $63 Billion; a deal
completed on June 7, 2018.
ChemChina, a Chinese state-owned enterprise acquired Z which was
based in Basel, Switzerland; a transaction that closed on June 26, 2017
18. 12. What was the Lovebird?
Eddy Current Controls is a Chalakudy-based company established in
1971. Eddy built the Lovebird which was credited to be the country's
first indigenously built ______ ______. Lovebird was built on a
lightweight high-tensile steel chassis and fiberglass reinforced polyester
and powered by a DC electric motor. Later the manufacturer had to
stop the production of Lovebird once it became clear that it was no
longer viable commercially, probably because the concept was ahead
of its time.
19. 13. What is her name? What is the Product?
The French fashion designer is the only fashion designer listed on Time
magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century is
known among other things for being the founder of the namesake perfume
brand. The 2012 book ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ exposed her collaboration
with the Nazis in Paris, her affair with a master spy, and her work for the
German military intelligence service and Himmler’s SS.
In 1926 she published a picture of a product in American Vogue. It was calf-
length, straight and decorated only by a few diagonal lines. Vogue called it
“______'s Ford". Like the Model T, the ______ _______ ______ was simple
and accessible for women of all social classes. Vogue also said that the
______ ______ ______ would become "a sort of uniform for all women of
taste”
20. 14. What is the company?
Headquartered in San Francisco, the cloud collaboration service was
founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas.
It is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but
applied to a spreadsheet. It currently offers 16 basic field types: single-
line texts, long text articles, file attachments, check-boxes, single select
from drop-down list, multiple-selects from drop-down lists, date and
time, phone numbers, email ids, URLs, numbers, currency, percentage,
auto-number, formulae and barcodes.
21. 15*. What characterizes ‘black companies’?
In Japan, these companies are called buraku kigyō or black companies.
In 2009, a drama film called "A man on the verge at a BLACK company"
was released. It was based on an office worker who started a 2ch
(anonymous Japanese textboard) thread about the black company he
worked at.
The protagonist of the manga ReLIFE worked at a black company.
In 2012, a group of people that included journalists, activists, and
university professors formed a special committee to create the "Black
Corporations Award“ to raise awareness and this is now an annual
award.
22. 16. What connects the following (not an
exhaustive list)?
1. L'Oréal - Shopclues
2. Titan - Snapdeal
3. HUL- Snapdeal
4. Casio – Snapdeal
5. Skechers – Flipkart
23. 17. Which social media platform?
In several 2020 "naughty or nice" tech lists, this social media platform got a
top "nice" rating thanks to several of its content moderation efforts to
combat online toxicity.
In August, the company announced that users searching for vaccine-related
information would be shown results from authoritative sources like the
World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, rather than being led down rabbit holes filled with
misinformation.
The company also introduced a “compassionate search” experience, which
offers mental health advice and exercises to users whose behavior indicates
they might be feeling anxious or depressed, such as people who search for
things like “sad quotes” or who look up terms relating to self-harm. And in
December, it joined other wedding websites in announcing that it would
limit the promotion of wedding venues that were once slave plantations.
24. 18. What connects these companies?
Aikid (Dec '18)
Smartisan (Jan '19)
Qinbei Wangxiao (May '19)
Dali Ketang (May '19)
Tangyuan English (Jul '19)
Minerva Project (Jul '19)
Yiqi Zuoye (Mar ‘18)
Xiaoyang Jiaoyu (Mar '18)
OpenLanguage (Apr '18)
Gogokid (May '18)
Haohao Xuaxi (Jul '18)
Xuabajun (Jul '18)
Exhaustive as of Dec '19. A social media platform is expected to spin-off
one of its sub-programs, which was started in Oct '19, into a separately
managed entity. That spin-off entity will also make it to the list.
25. 19. Which group ?
The board of Ambadi Investments, which owns shares in various
companies of the $5 billion, Chennai-based group, has traditionally
been reserved for male heirs of the family. Valli Arunachalam, whose
father was the 'karta' of the family is currently attempting to succeed
her father in the board.
26. 20*. Which two countries?
Using restaurant listings from TripAdvisor and sales figures from
Euromonitor, a researcher estimated world “trade” in cuisines for 52
countries.
The US, China, and Brazil are the top importers, having massive "cuisine
trade deficits". A significantly smaller country (X) and economy (in GDP
terms), meanwhile, ranks as the world’s biggest exporter by a wide
margin. The entire world’s appetite for their cuisine, plus the local
population's relative indifference to other cuisines, give the country a
$168Bn supper surplus.
The country in second place (Y), another small country but large
economy, has a surplus of only $47Bn.
27. 21. What brand ?
The Mattel Brand launched in 1959 has
seen a downward spiral in sales since
2009 with a 20% drop between 2012
and 2014 alone. The fall in sales has
been attributed to the brand promoting
sexism and millennial parents' being
more progressive. Attempts to
reimagine the brand has included
introduction of wider array of body
types, a hijab version, LGBT friendly
versions etc.
28. 22. What is X?
The proposed merger between Germany's Commerzbank which was
bailed out in 2009 by the government and X failed to materialize in the
first half of 2019. This was followed by a $ 8.3 Billion restructuring at X,
with a shift from servicing asset managers and hedge funds to selling
cash management, trade finance, and hedging products to corporate
clients.
29. 23. Which company?
It is the sacred five-peaked mountain of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu
cosmology and is considered to be the center of all the physical,
metaphysical and spiritual universes. Many famous Buddhist and
similar Jain as well as Hindu temples including Chinese pagodas have
been built as symbolic representations of this mountain. Some
researchers identify it with the Pamirs, northwest of Kashmir. Hindu
traditions describe it as 84,000 yojanas high (about 1,082,000 km
(672,000 mi), which would be 85 times the Earth's diameter.
A company founded in April 2007 by Neeraj Gupta in Mumbai shares its
named with the mythical mountain.
30. 24. Why did Rotodynes fail?
• Rotodynes were high-capacity part-plane part-helicopters designed in
the 1950s to be the "aerial public transport" in major cities. Their
vertical lift-off and landing capability meant that low-footprint
stations could be set up throughout the city and the aircraft could
make multiple stops, unlike the two-point flights of commercial
airplanes and helicopters.
• However, after a few test flights and much-covered celebrity trips,
demand for the rotodyne crashed. "While it was convenient for the
passengers, it was inconvenient for almost everyone else," said one of
the early-adopters.
31. 25*. Which ad?
Created by Orchard Advertising, a part of the Leo Burnett group, the 150
second ad released in mid 2005 was then touted as "the longest TV
commercial ever to be telecast in the history of Indian advertising."
With the client’s proviso that "The ad should not be flippant. It should be
shot like a Shyam Benegal film.“, the agency roped in National Award-winning
actor Murali to play the protagonist. Initially outraged at the thought of
being associated with pickles and shampoos, Murali was persuaded, once he
understood the concept.
The film was shot in picturesque Pollachi, in interior Tamil Nadu. Pollachi is
within driving distance of Coimbatore, where the airport sequence was shot.
And Coimbatore's proximity to Bangalore - where both the client and
Orchard were headquartered - meant the company could achieve huge
savings in logistics.
35. 2. Which app?
In late 2019, The New York Times contacted Apple and Google with its investigation
about a messaging app, which the newspaper claimed is used secretly by the
Emirati government to track every conversation, movement, relationship,
appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones. Within
weeks, following their own investigations, both companies removed the app from
their respective app stores.
The app, released mid-2019, was billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video
or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted
popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype. While the majority of its
users are in the Emirates, the app surged to become one of the most downloaded
social apps in the United States by the time it was removed from the app stores.
Huawei had also promoted the app in its own campaigns and created some
confusion back home since the name was similar to another popular Chinese app.
37. 3. What reason?
Every year winter brings in news reports of a certain reason leading to
hiring issues in New Delhi/NCR with newspaper and magazine stories
about people refusing to accept offers and looking to move out of the
city.
In a 17,000 response survey by LocalCircles, 40% of respondents
claimed they would like to move out due to the said reason.
According to a World Health Organization research, this issue costs the
global economy $225 billion each year in lost labor income.
39. 4. What is X?
X is an over-the-top (OTT) platform from an Indian mass media
company headquartered in Chennai. The OTT platform has recently
tied up with Reliance Jio. The OTT platform initiative has been headed
by the daughter of the Group promoter who was present at the recent
IPL bidding.
41. 5*. What broke the record?
The operation in early October 2017 following the collapse of Monarch
Airlines was the UK's biggest ever post-war repatriation with 110,000
passengers stranded overseas repatriated. What September 2019
incident broke that record?
43. 6. Fill in the Blank
The ______ Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1919, as a joint
venture of Walchand Hirachand along with Narottam Morarjee,
Kilachand Devchand and Lallubhai Samaldas all of them businessmen
from Gujarat. To start the company, Walchand Hirachand, and others
bought the SS Loyalty in 1919 from the Gwalior royal family. The vessel
was originally the RMS Empress of India (1890) bought from the
Canadian Pacific Railway and paid for by the Maharaja of Gwalior as a
hospital ship for Indian troops in the First World War. The company was
recognised as the first Swadeshi shipping company in the true sense of
the term and was referred to widely in Mahatma Gandhi’s columns in
Young India and Harijan.
46. 7. Which company/brand?
The American company that manufactures audio equipment was
founded by James Bullough Lansing who was an American audio
engineer and loudspeaker designer in 1946. Their first products were
the model D101 15-inch loudspeaker and the model D175 high-
frequency driver. The 1970s saw the company become a household
brand, starting with the famous L-100 model.
Today it is owned by Harman International Industries, a subsidiary of
South Korean company Samsung Electronics.
48. 8. Which book?
It is a 1987 book that is part memoir and part business-advice that
reached number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there
for 13 weeks, and altogether held a position on the list for 48 weeks.
One of the co-authors who claims to have ghostwritten the whole book
has been self-critical even saying he had "put lipstick on a pig.“
The other co-author replied to criticism with “He didn’t write the book,
I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1
best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some
say it was the best-selling business book ever.”
50. 9. How did this ad create news/controversy
outside the TV Screens?
The Vivo V17 Pro advertisement created by Dentsu Impact features
Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan and a little girl in an amusement park
where the said mobile phone is used for clicking pictures under
different settings.
52. 9. Ogilvy & Mather filed a lawsuit in Bombay High
Court for copying the idea and won!
The Bombay High Court had ruled that the Vivo ad
featuring actor Aamir Khan was very similar to the
contents of a proposal sent by ad-firm Ogilvy &
Mather.
53. 10*. What is the Aldi-Äquator?
Brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht officially founded the German grocery
chain Aldi in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II.
The ″Aldi-Äquator″ runs from the Rhine via Mülheim an der Ruhr,
Wermelskirchen, Marburg, Siegen, and Gießen east to just north of
Fulda.
55. 11. Identify the companies
The Big 6- Six large firms dominated the sale of seeds and agricultural
chemicals up to 2017 in the United States and around the world: BASF,
Bayer, Monsanto, X, Y and Z.
The estimated $130 billion merger of X and Y closed on August 31,
2017.
Bayer acquired Monsanto for an estimated $63 Billion; a deal
completed on June 7, 2018.
ChemChina, a Chinese state-owned enterprise acquired Z which was
based in Basel, Switzerland; a transaction that closed on June 26, 2017
57. 12. What was the Lovebird?
Eddy Current Controls is a Chalakudy-based company established in
1971. Eddy built the Lovebird which was credited to be the country's
first indigenously built ______ ______. Lovebird was built on a
lightweight high-tensile steel chassis and fiberglass reinforced polyester
and powered by a DC electric motor. Later the manufacturer had to
stop the production of Lovebird once it became clear that it was no
longer viable commercially, probably because the concept was ahead
of its time.
59. 13. What is her name? What is the Product?
The French fashion designer is the only fashion designer listed on Time
magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century is
known among other things for being the founder of the namesake perfume
brand. The 2012 book ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ exposed her collaboration
with the Nazis in Paris, her affair with a master spy, and her work for the
German military intelligence service and Himmler’s SS.
In 1926 she published a picture of a product in American Vogue. It was calf-
length, straight and decorated only by a few diagonal lines. Vogue called it
“______'s Ford". Like the Model T, the ______ _______ ______ was simple
and accessible for women of all social classes. Vogue also said that the
______ ______ ______ would become "a sort of uniform for all women of
taste”
61. 14. What is the company?
Headquartered in San Francisco, the cloud collaboration service was
founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas.
It is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but
applied to a spreadsheet. It currently offers 16 basic field types: single-
line texts, long text articles, file attachments, check-boxes, single select
from drop-down list, multiple-selects from drop-down lists, date and
time, phone numbers, email ids, URLs, numbers, currency, percentage,
auto-number, formulae and barcodes.
63. 15*. What characterizes ‘black companies’?
In Japan, these companies are called buraku kigyō or black companies.
In 2009, a drama film called "A man on the verge at a BLACK company"
was released. It was based on an office worker who started a 2ch
(anonymous Japanese textboard) thread about the black company he
worked at.
The protagonist of the manga ReLIFE worked at a black company.
In 2012, a group of people that included journalists, activists, and
university professors formed a special committee to create the "Black
Corporations Award“ to raise awareness and this is now an annual
award.
67. 17. Which social media platform?
In several 2020 "naughty or nice" tech lists, this social media platform got a
top "nice" rating thanks to several of its content moderation efforts to
combat online toxicity.
In August, the company announced that users searching for vaccine-related
information would be shown results from authoritative sources like the
World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, rather than being led down rabbit holes filled with
misinformation.
The company also introduced a “compassionate search” experience, which
offers mental health advice and exercises to users whose behavior indicates
they might be feeling anxious or depressed, such as people who search for
things like “sad quotes” or who look up terms relating to self-harm. And in
December, it joined other wedding websites in announcing that it would
limit the promotion of wedding venues that were once slave plantations.
69. 18. What connects these companies?
Aikid (Dec '18)
Smartisan (Jan '19)
Qinbei Wangxiao (May '19)
Dali Ketang (May '19)
Tangyuan English (Jul '19)
Minerva Project (Jul '19)
Yiqi Zuoye (Mar ‘18)
Xiaoyang Jiaoyu (Mar '18)
OpenLanguage (Apr '18)
Gogokid (May '18)
Haohao Xuaxi (Jul '18)
Xuabajun (Jul '18)
Exhaustive as of Dec '19. A social media platform is expected to spin-off
one of its sub-programs, which was started in Oct '19, into a separately
managed entity. That spin-off entity will also make it to the list.
70. 18. ByteDance owns them (partly or wholly)
ByteDance is TikTok’s parent company. TikTok introduced EduTok
program, which it is planning to spinoff.
71. 19. Which group ?
The board of Ambadi Investments, which owns shares in various
companies of the $5 billion, Chennai-based group, has traditionally
been reserved for male heirs of the family. Valli Arunachalam, whose
father was the 'karta' of the family is currently attempting to succeed
her father in the board.
73. 20*. Which two countries?
Using restaurant listings from TripAdvisor and sales figures from
Euromonitor, a researcher estimated world “trade” in cuisines for 52
countries.
The US, China, and Brazil are the top importers, having massive "cuisine
trade deficits". A significantly smaller country (X) and economy (in GDP
terms), meanwhile, ranks as the world’s biggest exporter by a wide
margin. The entire world’s appetite for their cuisine, plus the local
population's relative indifference to other cuisines, give the country a
$168Bn supper surplus.
The country in second place (Y), another small country but large
economy, has a surplus of only $47Bn.
75. 21. What brand ?
The Mattel Brand launched in 1959 has
seen a downward spiral in sales since
2009 with a 20% drop between 2012
and 2014 alone. The fall in sales has
been attributed to the brand promoting
sexism and millennial parents' being
more progressive. Attempts to
reimagine the brand has included
introduction of wider array of body
types, a hijab version, LGBT friendly
versions etc.
77. 22. What is X?
The proposed merger between Germany's Commerzbank which was
bailed out in 2009 by the government and X failed to materialize in the
first half of 2019. This was followed by a $ 8.3 Billion restructuring at X,
with a shift from servicing asset managers and hedge funds to selling
cash management, trade finance, and hedging products to corporate
clients.
79. 23. Which company?
It is the sacred five-peaked mountain of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu
cosmology and is considered to be the center of all the physical,
metaphysical and spiritual universes. Many famous Buddhist and
similar Jain as well as Hindu temples including Chinese pagodas have
been built as symbolic representations of this mountain. Some
researchers identify it with the Pamirs, northwest of Kashmir. Hindu
traditions describe it as 84,000 yojanas high (about 1,082,000 km
(672,000 mi), which would be 85 times the Earth's diameter.
A company founded in April 2007 by Neeraj Gupta in Mumbai shares its
named with the mythical mountain.
81. 24. Why did Rotodynes fail?
• Rotodynes were high-capacity part-plane part-helicopters designed in
the 1950s to be the "aerial public transport" in major cities. Their
vertical lift-off and landing capability meant that low-footprint
stations could be set up throughout the city and the aircraft could
make multiple stops, unlike the two-point flights of commercial
airplanes and helicopters.
• However, after a few test flights and much-covered celebrity trips,
demand for the rotodyne crashed. "While it was convenient for the
passengers, it was inconvenient for almost everyone else," said one of
the early-adopters.
83. 25*. Which ad?
Created by Orchard Advertising, a part of the Leo Burnett group, the 150
second ad released in mid 2005 was then touted as "the longest TV
commercial ever to be telecast in the history of Indian advertising."
With the client’s proviso that "The ad should not be flippant. It should be
shot like a Shyam Benegal film.“, the agency roped in National Award-winning
actor Murali to play the protagonist. Initially outraged at the thought of
being associated with pickles and shampoos, Murali was persuaded, once he
understood the concept.
The film was shot in picturesque Pollachi, in interior Tamil Nadu. Pollachi is
within driving distance of Coimbatore, where the airport sequence was shot.
And Coimbatore's proximity to Bangalore - where both the client and
Orchard were headquartered - meant the company could achieve huge
savings in logistics.
84. 25*.Air Deccan ad
The Old Man and the Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRQlOKSyCoA