Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

It’s the end of New Zealand book month, so our quiz is all about literature and quotable quotes.

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The Olympics have finished, and I managed to successfully miss it … but it seems like a good time to write a quiz about the spirit of sportsmanship, the glory of sport and the honor of participation.

Click on ‘Find the answer in Te Ara’ to get some clues. You may find some of them rather cryptic, but you wouldn’t want us to make it too easy would you?

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Mabel Howard, New Zealand's first woman cabinet minister

Waiting … waiting … for something to happen, for everyone to file through the doors and be seated, for someone in charge to give us our instructions, to start our written test.

And while we waited, we watched a replay of the show. We watched as a poor Australian girl used all three of her lifelines on a $300 question.

‘You’re s’posed to breeze through these questions’, said one fellow wannabe Who wants to be a millionaire? contestant to another. He was right; all of us knew the answer that the Australian contestant was struggling with. We were waiting for our own chance to be up on that stage, and to get those answers right.

The Wellington auditions for the New Zealand version of the television game show Who wants to be a millionaire? were on Sunday. And I, like any good quiz-mistress worth her salt, had to check it out.

I trained every day; answering 15 questions from The weakest link quiz book and studying the Dominion Post quiz every morning. However, I could not have prepared for the questions I would be asked on Sunday.

My mistake: working for an encyclopedia. Well, actually, it was thinking that working for Te Ara was somehow osmotically enhancing my knowledge and that, in essence, I was the encyclopedia.

So, after it was all over, I had a quick search to see if even an encyclopedic knowledge would have helped me to correctly answer the questions I got wrong on Sunday. If that osmosis had been working, I would have answered that it was Mabel Howard who was New Zealand’s first female cabinet minister, and not Hilda Ross.

But I still couldn’t have answered that the CKD vehicle that Todd Motors produced in Petone was an acronym for Completely Knocked Down, although I would have some other interesting facts about Todd Motors.

And I still couldn’t have answered that the plant Camellia sinensis produces New Zealand’s favourite cuppa. But I would have known just how much we love the stuff – tea pops up in Te Ara a lot. Camellias get several mentions too, more often in the 1966 encyclopedia, but, alas, not the ones that produce tea.

Encyclopedic knowledge or not, I didn’t make it to the second round of the audition, so it looks like I’ll be waiting just a little bit longer to be a millionaire.

It’s the end of the month, and that’s quiz time! This month it’s all about numbers.

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New Zealand Music Month is drawing to a close. Console yourself with our music-themed quiz.

A word of warning: ‘Find the answer in Te Ara’ will often lead you to just a clue.

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