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You Gotta Know These American Warships



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You Gotta Know These American Warships


The following list of nine American warships includes eight of the most important or interesting ships in the U.S. Navy, as well as one from the navy of the Confederate States of America. Though there are some ships that were more involved in battle, these mark significant advancements in naval technology or turning points in U.S. history; most importantly, they are the ships that come up most frequently in quiz bowl.

  1. USS Constitution Better known as "Old Ironsides," the Constitution was one of the first six ships commissioned by the U.S. Navy after the American Revolution. Launched from Boston in 1797, the Constitution first saw action as the squadron flagship in the Quasi-War with France from 1799-1801 and also fought in the Barbary War and the War of 1812. She later served many years as the nation's flagship in the Mediterranean. Retired from active duty in 1846, the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" saved her from the scrap yard--she became the training ship of the U.S. Naval Academy until the mid-1880s. She became the symbolic flagship of the U.S. Navy in 1940 and is now a floating museum in Boston.

  2. USS Chesapeake The USS Chesapeake was built at what is now the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, between 1798 and 1799. The Chesapeake was attacked by the British Leopard off Cape Henry in 1807 (which led to the duel between Commodores James Barron and Stephen Decatur), one of the causes of the War of 1812. She was captured off Boston in 1813 by the British frigate Shannon, on which occasion her commander, Capt. James Lawrence, uttered his celebrated dying words, "Don't give up the ship," which have become a tradition in the U.S. Navy.

  3. USS Lawrence/USS Niagara Oliver Hazard Perry's decisive victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813 ensured American control of the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. In the battle, Perry's flagship, the USS Lawrence, was severely damaged and four-fifths of her crew killed or wounded. Commodore Perry and a small contingent rowed a half-mile through heavy gunfire to another American ship, the USS Niagara. Boarding and taking command, he brought her into battle and soundly defeated the British fleet. Perry summarized the fight in a now-famous message to General William Henry Harrison: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

  4. USS Monitor/CSS Virginia [aka USS Merrimack] After departing Union forces burned the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk in April 1861, yard workers salvaged the USS Merrimack and converted her into the ironclad CSS Virginia. On March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia left the shipyard and sank two Union warships in Hampton Roads. The South's ironclad rammed and sank the USS Cumberland and set fire to and sank the USS Congress, one of the nation's first six frigates. The Monitor was sent to end its rampage and the two ironclads battled for 3 1/2 hours before the Virginia ran aground in its attempt to ram the USS Minnesota. Visibly damaged, the Virginia retreated and the Monitor withdrew to protect the Minnesota. The Confederates destroyed the Virginia soon after to prevent her capture by Union forces. The Monitor, victorious in her first battle, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, NC. The shipwreck is a national underwater sanctuary under the purview of the NOAA.

  5. USS Maine (ACR-1) [Second class] The first Maine, a second-class armored battleship was launched in 1889. A part of the "Great White Fleet," in 1897 the Maine sailed for Havana to show the flag and protect American citizens. Shortly after 9:40 pm on February 15, 1898, the battleship was torn apart by a tremendous explosion. The court of inquiry convened in March was unable to obtain evidence associating the blast with any person or persons, but public opinion--inflamed by "yellow journalism"--was such that the Maine disaster led to the declaration of war on Spain on April 21, 1898.

  6. USS Arizona (BB-39) [Pennsylvania class] A lead ship of the honor escort for President Wilson's trip to France in 1918, she was on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor when Japanese aircraft appeared just before 8:00 am on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The Arizona came under attack almost immediately, and at about 8:10 was hit by an 800-kilogram bomb just forward of turret two on the starboard side. Within a few seconds the forward powder magazines exploded, killing 1,177 of the crew, and the ship sank to the bottom of the harbor. In 1962 the USS Arizona memorial opened and is now administered by the National Park Service.

  7. USS Missouri (BB-63) [Iowa class] The fourth USS Missouri was the last battleship completed by the United States; she was laid down January 6, 1941 by New York Naval Shipyard. The Missouri was launched January 29, 1944 and received her sponsorship from Miss Margaret Truman, daughter of then Missouri Senator, Harry S Truman. Commissioned on June 11, 1944, the "Mighty Mo," as she became known, sailed for the Pacific and quickly became the flagship of Admiral Halsey, which is why she was chosen as the site of the formal surrender of the Empire of Japan on the morning of September 1, 1945.

  8. USS Nautilus (SSN-571) [Nautilus class] In 1951 Congress authorized construction of the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. On December 12 of that year, the Navy Department announced that she would be the sixth ship of the fleet to bear the name Nautilus. She was launched on January 21, 1954. Eight months later, on September 30, 1954, the Nautilus became the first commissioned nuclear-powered ship in the U.S. Navy. On the morning of January 17, 1955, Nautilus' Cmdr. Wilkinson signaled "Underway on Nuclear Power." In 1958 she departed Pearl Harbor under top secret orders to conduct "Operation Sunshine," the first crossing of the North Pole by a ship.


You Gotta Know These Programming Languages


  1. C++ is a popular, compiled, high-level language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1985 at Bell Labs. C++ is similar to C, but adds object-oriented features (classes), generic programming (templates), and exception handling to the language. It is a popular language for developing business applications and, increasingly, games.

  2. Java is a popular high-level language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. The language was originally named OAK and unsuccessfully used for set-top devices, but hit it big after being renamed in 1995 and introduced to the World Wide Web. It is a relatively pure object-oriented language with syntax similar to C++. Instead of being compiled to object code, it is compiled to Java bytecode, which is then interpreted or compiled on the fly. This use of machine-independent bytecode gives it its "write once, run everywhere" property. Java is principally used for client-side web application ("applets") and server-side web application ("servlets") that make use of J2EE technology. The success of Java inspired Microsoft to introduce its C# language and .NET framework.

  3. BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a high-level language developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the mid 1960s. It is easy to use but its relative lack of structure makes maintaining programs difficult. There have been many versions of BASIC and some more modern ones (TurboBasic, QuickBasic Visual Basic) have added advanced features. Stereotypical programs like 10 PRINT "HELLO" and 10 GOTO 10 are written in BASIC.

  4. C, a compiled successor to the B programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972. It is a high-level and highly standardized language that remains very "close to the hardware" and allows the programmer to perform useful, fast, and dangerous tricks. It is widely used for business applications, games, operating systems (particularly UNIX and Linux), and device drivers.

  5. Perl is an interpreted language designed principally to process text. It was written by Larry Wall and first released in 1988. It is intended to be practical and concise rather than theoretically elegant and is sometimes lampooned as "write one, read never" because of its heavy use of symbols and idiom. It is often used for web CGI scripts and parsing log files. "Perl" is an unofficial retronym for "Practical Extraction Report Language."

  6. ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) was created in the late 1950s and was the first procedural language intended for solving mathematical and scientific problems. Formalized in a report titled ALGOL 58, it progressed through ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68 before waning in popularity. ALGOL was sufficiently advanced and respected that most modern procedural languages reflect its overall structure and design; some, like Pascal, are very closely related.

  7. Pascal is a high-level, compiled language built upon ALGOL. It is named after the 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal and was developed by Niklaus Wirth during 1967-71. Pascal is best known for its emphasis on structured programming techniques and strong typing; because of this, it was extremely popular as a teaching language in the 1980s and early 1990s, though it was never popular for business or scientific applications. The object-oriented language Delphi was based on Pascal.

  8. LISP (LISt Processing) is the ancestor of the family of functional languages that emphasize evaluating expressions rather than executing imperative commands. It was developed in 1950-1960 by John McCarthy and is used primarily for symbolic manipulations of complicated structures rather than numerical calculation. It and its descendants (Scheme, CommonLisp, etc.) continue to be used in academic research, particularly artificial intelligence.

  9. Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) is the oldest high-level language. Designed by John Backus for IBM during the late 1950s, it was once in use on virtually every computer in the world and is still used today for engineering and scientific applications because of the quality of its compilers and numerical libraries. The most popular Fortran versions are Fortran IV, 77, and 90. The name "Fortran" was originally entirely capitalized, but the ANSI Fortran Committee has since declared the "initial capital" spelling official.

  10. COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 by CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages) under the direction of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and is the second-oldest high-level language. It emphasized record-processing and database access and uses an English-like syntax, all attributes that led to widespread use in business, particularly the financial sector. It is characterized as especially wordy (just as C and Perl are characterized as terse). The vast majority of Year 2000 problems involved programs written in COBOL.

You Gotta Know These Olympics


  1. 1896 Summer (Athens, Greece; April 6 - April 15, 1896) The first edition of the modern Olympics was the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France; winners were awarded silver medals. Some of the stranger events included one-handed weightlifting and 100-meter freestyle swimming for members of the Greek navy. Appropriately, Greek shepherd Spiridon Louis became the hero of the Games by winning the marathon.

  2. 1912 Summer (Stockholm, Sweden; May 5 - July 22, 1912) While the Swedes introduced electronic timers to the games, the athletic hero was United States decathlete and Native American Jim Thorpe. He won the pentathlon, placed fourth in the high jump, and seventh in the long jump. Finally, Thorpe went on to win the decathlon with a score so astounding that it would still have won him the silver medal in 1948. During the medal presentation, Swedish king Gustav V said, "Sir, you are the greatest athlete" to which Thorpe purportedly replied "Thanks, King."

  3. 1936 Summer (Berlin, Germany; August 1-16, 1936) These games are best remembered for Alabama native Jesse Owens' amazing work on the track against a backdrop of Nazi propaganda emphasizing Aryan superiority. The American athlete won the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, long jump, and 4 x 100-meter sprint relay. Despite the growing strength of the Nazi state, the German people became enamored with Owens and named a Berlin street for him after his 1980 death. On other fronts, the Olympics were broadcast on television for the first time (as seen in the film Contact) and also saw the introduction of the relay of the Olympic torch.

  4. 1968 Summer (Mexico City, Mexico; October 12-27, 1968) In addition to being the first Olympics to be held at high altitude, these Games saw U.S. long jumper Bob Beamon set a record of 8.90 meters that would remain untouched for 23 years. The Games ended on a controversial note: to protest the Mexican government's killing of at least 250 unarmed demonstrators on the eve of the Games, Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a silent protest with a black gloved, raised fist "Black Power" salute during the award ceremony for the 200-meter race. This didn't sit well with the International Olympic Committee who promptly ordered them home.

  5. 1972 Summer (Munich, West Germany; August 26-September 11, 1972) One of the most tragic Olympics ever, these Games saw the kidnapping and killing of 11 Israeli athletes by eight Palestinian terrorists, five of whom were shot dead by West German police. Jim McKay of ABC Sports remained on the air for hours, bringing American viewers up to date on the situation. Though the Olympics paused for 34 hours, the IOC ordered the games to continue and memorable performances were turned in by American swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals, and Russian gymnast Olga Korbut, who captivated audiences en route to winning three gold medals.

  6. 1980 Winter (Lake Placid, NY, United States; February 12-24, 1980) In an Olympics where a single man, American speed skater Eric Heiden, would win five gold medals and not be the biggest story, something very special had to happen. In what would become known as "The Miracle on Ice," the U.S. Olympic hockey team, led by head coach Herb Brooks and captain Mike Eruzione, defeated the powerful Soviet team 4-3 on February 22, 1980. Two days later, they defeated Finland to claim America's second Olympic hockey gold medal, the first being in 1960 at Squaw Valley.

  7. 1980 Summer (Moscow, Soviet Union; July 19 - August 3, 1980) Despite the glow from the Lake Placid Games, these Games were marred by a United States boycott ordered by President Jimmy Carter in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This lead was followed by Canada, West Germany, Japan, Kenya and China, while other Western nations left it up to their individual athletes, many of whom chose to partake. The result was an Eastern Bloc field day, with all 54 East German rowers earning a medal and the Soviets totaling 80 gold medals. British distance runner Sebastian Coe produced the West's best performance by winning the 1500-meter race.

  8. 1984 Summer (Los Angeles, CA, United States; July 28 - August 12, 1984) One good turn deserves another, or in this case, "The Russians aren't coming, the Russians aren't coming." Virtually every Communist nation skipped these games, leaving the door open for a "USA all the way" feeling, as the Americans took home 83 gold medals out of a total of 174. Among the highlights were American sprinter Carl Lewis' repeat of Jesse Owens 1936 performance: winning the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, long jump, and 4 x 100 meter sprint relay. In gymnastics, West Virginia native Mary Lou Retton won the all-around gold medal.

  9. 1994 Winter (Lillehammer, Norway; February 12-February 27, 1994) Massachusetts native Nancy Kerrigan and Oregonian Tonya Harding were among America's leading hopes for gold in women's figure skating. During the Olympic Trials in Detroit, Kerrigan was viciously attacked by an unknown assailant, who would later be traced back to Harding. In the ensuing media circus, both Kerrigan and Harding were sent to Norway, but their thunder was stolen by Ukrainian skate Oksana Baiul, who edged out silver medallist Kerrigan, while Harding placed eighth. Sweden won the ice hockey gold by defeating Canada in a shootout; future Colorado Avalanche forward Peter Forsberg's game-winning effort against Canadian goalie Sean Burke was immortalized on a Swedish postage stamp. In speed skating, Bonnie Blair won her third straight gold in the 500-meters and second straight in the 1,000-meters, perennial hard luck kid Dan Jansen won Olympic gold in his last race, the 1,000 meters, and Norwegian Johann Olav Koss won three gold medals, all in world-record times.

  10. 1996 Summer (Atlanta, GA, United States; July 25 - August 8, 1996) In what have been called "The Coke Games," due to their exceptional commercialization in the city of Coke's business headquarters, the sweltering Georgia heat and organizational problems made these Games a veritable nightmare. But a still-unsolved bombing in Centennial Olympic Park that killed one person and injured one hundred that remains the Games' most memorable event. Irish swimmer Michelle Smith won three gold medals in the pool, only to be plagued by rumors of steroid use. Carl Lewis got his ninth gold by winning the long jump for the fourth consecutive Games, while American sprinter Michael Johnson became the first man to win the 200-meter and 400-meter races, the former in a world-record 19.32 seconds.

You Gotta Know These Quintuples
These ten topics are connected by only two things: There are five answers in each set and they all come up repeatedly in quiz bowl.

  1. "The Waste Land" The five parts of T. S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece "The Waste Land" are "The Burial of the Dead," "A Game of Chess," "The Fire Sermon," "Death By Water," and "What the Thunder Said."

  2. Mitosis The five stages of the biological process of mitosis (the production of new body cells from existing ones) are interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase. Interphase is not technically a part of mitosis, but it still sometimes finds its way in.

  3. Nobel Prize Winners The five original winners of Nobel Prizes (1901) were Wilhelm Röntgen (physics, for the discovery of X rays), Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (chemistry, for laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure), Emil Adolf von Behring (physiology or medicine, for his serum therapy remedy for diphtheria), Sully Prudhomme (literature, for his idealistic poetry), and Henri Dunant and Frédéric Passy (peace, for founding the International Red Cross and the first French peace society, respectively).

  4. The Mighty Handful Five nationalist Russian composers are often referred to as "The Mighty Handful" or "The Five." They are Modest Mussorgsky (1839 -1881), Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), Cesar Cui (1835-1918), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908).

  5. D-Day The codenames for the five beaches attacked in Operation Overlord on D-Day are Gold, Juno, Sword, Utah, and Omaha. The first three were attacked by British and Canadian forces while the latter two were assaulted by American troops.

  6. Orders of Architecture There are five classical "orders of architecture," a term that primarily refers to the design of the columns used in the building. They are the Doric (simple, used for the Parthenon), Ionic (fancier, fluted with scrolls on their capitals), Corinthian (baroque, fluted with acanthus-like leaves for capitals), Tuscan (plain, similar to Doric), and Composite (mixture of Ionic and Corinthian). The latter two orders are Roman developments, the other three originated with the Greeks.

  7. Cooperstown The first five members elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.

  8. Spectral Lines Hydrogen produces an infinite series of spectral lines. The first five of those series are named after scientists who observed them before it was known that they were actually examples of the same phenomenon. From lowest to highest energy of the final level, they are known as the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen, Brackett, and Pfund series. Only the Balmer series exists in the visible spectrum.

  9. Platonic Solids There are only five regular polyhedra, three-dimensional shapes with congruent regular polygons for sides. These, known as the Platonic solids, are the tetrahedron (4 triangular sides), cube (6 square sides), octahedron (8 triangular sides), dodecahedron (12 pentagonal sides), and icosahedron (20 triangular sides).

  10. Pillars of Islam Islam has five fundamental tenets of religious life, a group known as the Pillars of Islam. They are the declaration of faith (Shahadah), prayer (Salat), giving charity to those in need (Zakat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (Sawm), and the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) to be performed once in each adherent's lifetime.


You Gotta Know These Computation Areas
This You Gotta Know article is devoted to twelve computational areas that will help the most in solving the sorts of math questions that come up in NAQT invitational series. NAQT's collegiate sets tend to have very little computation and much of that is in the context of a specific field (physics, economics, chemistry, etc.).

  1. Pythagorean Triples. Almost certainly, the most important things to know are the basic sets of integers that satisfy the Pythagorean Theorem (a2 + b2 = c2) and could be the side lengths of a right triangle. These are called Pythagorean Triples and the simplest ones are 3-4-5, 5-12-13, 7-24-25, and 8-15-17. Note that any multiple of a Pythagorean Triple is also a Pythagorean Triple so that 6-8-10, 15-20-25, and 300-400-500 are also ones by virtue of 3-4-5 being one.

  2. Matrices. Every team should be able to add, subtract, multiply, take the determinant of, transpose, and invert matrices, particularly two-by-two ones.

  3. Vectors. Every team should be able to find the length of a vector, and add, subtract, find the angle between, the dot product of, and the cross product of two vectors.

  4. Solids. Teams should be able to calculate the volume and surface area of simple geometric figures including the sphere, cone, cylinder, pyramid, hemisphere, prism, and parallelepiped.

  5. Plane Figures. Teams should be able to calculate the areas of triangles (especially equilateral triangles), trapezoids, parallelograms, rhombi, and circles using different angles and lengths.

  6. Similar Figures. The areas of similar figures are related by the square of any corresponding length and the volumes are related by the cube of any corresponding length. For instance, if a square has a diagonal that is 30% longer than another square, it has an area that is (1.30 x 1.30 = ) 1.69 times as great (69% greater). Similar reasoning applies to perimeters, side lengths, diameters, and so forth.


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