Last night's Jeopardy final question was:
"With 4, more national capitals are located on this river than any other river in the world"
The key to jeopardy is that the questions give more clues to the answer. the first thing the contestants seemed to think of was to pick a long river to answer. That appeared to lead them astray as two picked the Nile, which is incorrect. Rather, if it is four national capitols then it must be in a place in the world that has many nations close together, that they might share a river. That had me thinking of Europe and so I picked the Danube, which was the correct answer.
Since I think I am a big hotshot, and I like to test my intellectual limits , I tried to think of the capitols. I guessed Prague, Bucharest, and Vienna, but I could not think of a fourth. I suppose that is for the best since I only got one, Vienna, correct. The four are: Vienna (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Belgrade (Serbia). Prague is too far north, and so is Bucharest. That is why today I looked it up so I could learn something.
What capitols are on the Nile? Cairo (Egypt) and the Blue and the White Nile meet at Khartoum in Sudan, but Addis Ababa in Ethopia is not on the Nile. Thanks for playing, though.
Another interesting thought inspired by this question is the number of national capitals that have rivers flowing through them. Since most cities are situated in places which have natural transportation by water like rivers I am sure that most national capitals have a river associated with them. That might be a good Jeopardy category itself. Given the river, name the national capital.
Thames: London
Seine: Paris
Hudson: New York
Liffey: Dublin
Molonglo: Canberra
3 comments:
Uh, New York isn't a capital of anything.
Potomac: Washington DC
Did I say I was too clever for my own good. Jack confirms it. New York is not the capital of anything, and I slink away embarrassed.
Maybe I was thinking world cities. Thanks for the correction.
Well, Jeopardy this season posed, "This river flows through Washington, DC," and the contestant asked, "What is the Potomac?" and this was considered correct. But as a former resident of the area, I didn't think it was. A much better question, IMHO, would have been, "What is the Anacostia?" as it clearly flows through the district. The Potomac is alongside it. To say that the Potomac flows through DC gets into some old and odd legal arguments related to the original grant from the king of England setting up the colony of Maryland, the foundation of the District of Columbia, and the later return of Arlington from DC to VA.
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