hello everyone welcome to community conversations i'm your host roger coulton since we began community conversations last fall we've had any number of community leaders in as our guests we've  had the cabinet minister and we've had the chief of police richard mcgaugh flynn we've had both the principal of the high school and of the middle school we've had the director of the farmer's market and the director of the habitat wildlife and education and in wildlife sanctuary one thing we know here in belmont however is that something else we have in our community is we have incredible students and we here at the media center when it to take an opportunity to meet some of those students and provide their stories to you the community we've actually teamed teed up three different segments of student leaders for you here at the belmont media center on community conversations we're having one segment on athletics one on academics and one on community service tonight segment of community conversations is going to look at academics and for academic segment i'm going to introduce you to members of the belmont high high school quiz show team that participated in the g b h quiz show eva hill  introduce the other members of the high school quiz show team there are so my understanding is there are six members overall and if i can ask our our staff to throw up the some of the four regular members let me call them of the high school quiz show team that's me i'm even and even as the captain of the team then we have cam cam you're a sophomore at belmont  the belmont high quiz show team can you can you tell us a little bit about the quiz show competition it's done through w g b h right correct what can you tell us about that they narrowed the field down to sixteen teams so we were one of the sixteen teams chosen to go into the first round of live shows and they try you out basically you sit in a room and you're asked a series of questions from different sites some of them are independently you have to answer independently and some of them are collaborative so the for the first section and they can it can be absolutely anything from what do you call the era in which the  the dinosaurs one expects to how do you spell millennium some of them will be you're allowed to confer with your teammates before answering some of them it's you you raise your hand to the moderator calls on you and then you give your answer and it's scored on a point scale and the sixteen highest teams to charter or private and twelve fourteen public will make it up and to give our viewers a notion of what this is when it for when you guys finally when you folks finally make it to the t v part of the show the staff here at the belmont media center has taken the liberty of putting together a clip  some of the questions and answers so can we keep that up and show it to our community the boy who cried wolf and the tortoise and the hare are fables ascribed to what a legendary greek author yes it 's up yes carbohydrates are organic compounds made of atoms of carbon hydrogen and what third element yes can oxygen correct only two elements on the periodic table or a liquid at standard temperature and pressure one is mercury name the other city yes one is the chemical symbol for silver yes yes in all normal healthy mammals the heart is composed of how many jaber yes what british silent film star is best known for his iconic character yes yes express your answer as a fraction not a percentage and for ten points in february two thousand and sixteen hillary clinton won six out matter solid liquid or gas yes camp solids yes and you've got the board cam and belmont category my vision good vibrations thirty points at stake here named for the austrian scientist who first i'd like to congratulate you and thank you for doing what you do small thank you what i would like to ask you is there are six members on the team how do you choose the the members of the team are none of us had ever been that ever had ever done this before so if i made a written test of a fifty questions i think it was hard very few people got more than twenty correct they're really strange can and how do you prepare for that i don't because it's a trivia contest right how do you study i do or do you study i didn't care i don't recommend studying for this trial test it's sort of you because you can because you have to study all of human history also all of science mathematics and literature so there's no relationship between what the what the questions are in what you study in class  is ok so ok yeah it's having taken biology or european history or something or american history all of those things are helpful but you have so you have to know what you've studied class yes and how do you i have to ask silly question here how do you practice what i'm going to call the button because it's in my mind when there is sort of a three step process here you have to know the information you have to conjure that information up so you know you know that you know the answer and then you have to hit the button how do you practice well for starters that is definitely the one thing that i personally five at a time and then move the paper over to someone else to read off i have to ask you are you or is everybody on the team good at trivial pursuit i don't know never  folks at home at the notion that some of the types of questions i'm not going to ask you to to answer this but just to give the folks at home a notion of the kinds of questions you've  i believe that you are answering questions on your own we saw that in the clip that we saw in there are times you answer questions as a team yeah right what happens when you disagree on a question or on any answer we have to do it fast someone thing you have to put in differing opinions and then decide which one you're going to go with and another thing we could have done a lot better this year is do a better collaboration of quickly spreading answers throughout the team there were a couple of occasions on which someone on the end had the correct answer and it didn't get to everyone in time because our strategy is to all press the bus or at the same time have the best possible chance of getting in and once the buzzer goes you can confer any more so if you watch last year the team had a really good strategy for quickly moving an answer up and down the board and we were not so good at that so it's it's a lot about quickly picking something and then making sure everyone is doing the same thing and you know the topics ahead of time we saw in the you know it's like jeopardy we do not know the time you don't have the time mixing you know the titles the topics and with specially don't know what the titles refer to the titles are almost they are almost never really relevant to what the actual thing oh yes last year there was a section called the fourth awakens which is sort of been about star wars was about physics so when you prepare is a team because this really is a team sport or sport let me call it sport a team competition but even though it's an individual that's on the line at any given moment but when you prepare do you assign top xander do you specialize or does everybody seek to maximize what he or she know so we a fine topics but he was so much stripped sunny of topics as to who's going to answer a question it's more of if you are going to like look at all questions or study up on commonly asked questions that's with more focusing on studying then for a sunday who's going to answer at a given time i will say that the in the audition process of the tryout or whatever it was part of some of the decisions i made on who made the team and who didn't and who isn't alternate a which answers were better was not just by score but also by where people crossed over in their knowledge of things but does if you have four people who are very very good at history that's great but not effective for something like this so so you need somebody naturally who knows history but who knows math who knows science who knows or or you need one person who knows history and one princeton has math and science that's when i met you when you need it you need a  student leadership in the academic area but even if you were the captain of the team and it sounds like that being the captain had cast that were associated with that he well i think that my so i do think it's a good leadership thing and i think it's an interesting leadership experience to be suddenly in charge of something you were just observing before our previous captain was there on the team for four years and he had to make an all new team last year but a lot of the people three of the people who were on the team last year were from the other belmont's other quiz club qui bowl which is a non televised trivia competition but so i was the only non senior so this year i went from alternate to captain and so i had to sort of figure out all that stuff and i had a lot of help from our previous captain and from as well yams yes she is and did she take an active i assume she took an active part yeah she helped me with all of the grading the tests he registered us should sort of know how everything she's been the captain for a lot longer than i have cameras can you take us through that we have a few pictures from one of the days and i think that people will get a kick out of the fact that it's not simply an empty studio but  little so this this here at least so we each drove with her parents and we met about ten minutes before we were supposed to be there and miss williams also boxes whenever members was exceptionally tall so with a mother's aid and yes yes we rest of us were all on boxes he didn't look quite as tall they just they do sort of a dry run to make sure everything looks ok i think someone light may have been out saw with the table in the middle of the two buzzers right that was actually new this year it used to be just one person from each team would go up and answer all the questions so they had to teach everyone the sort of maneuvers of how to get around the panel board thing and then line up and move to the back of one and there's a live audience there and people were there i remember one time when my wife and i went to watch the quiz show team this was several years ago and there are people there screaming and yelling yes you know north brought their mascot which was a kind of a doorbell fluffy tiger they could have been terrifying if there was if it and you know it's it's all about ready to start where were your feelings at that time i have been i did that when i did this last year they had to restart it like twice both of the the audiences clapping was like slightly off center or something so i was just mainly hoping that we don't have to do it once i think we did have to redo it because we went the wrong way around the panel or something like that but i don't know it's kind of cool you need a line up and then you run out and there's the screaming crowd it's kind of surreal and do you feel that you're not simply there to compete but you're there and i don't know if this is a fair question but you're there just maybe putting too much on your shoulders to represent your school and you're there representing your community in addition to just flat out wanting to win because it's a competition is are you conscious of that i think so to some extent but i i'm sorry you first i'm always surprised when people know we exist because we don't advertise ourselves very much so that's that's too bad a little but yeah i mean we do our best but but when i was going to say that i think that especially in the run up that something you thinking about but when you get there i think w b s does a really good job of trying to calm the fear of having your entire communities pride rested on earth and this stage mender specially you know all of the stuff are really really really really friendly and really do their best to keep you from freaking out constantly i'd like to take you down memory lane for a minute is there a moment that either good or bad well let's start with the correct is there a moment that you will forever remember from the day of the competition or is there a moment that stands out but that strength to forever remember is there a moment that stands out and i was surprised how much we all knew because that about minister read that when i was in there we had practiced or really studied but i think you can surprise yourself with how much you exclusive but trivia competition is their relatively small field and most people know a lot of the other people they're competing against and i think that really prevents it from becoming  competitive to the point that it loses its good nature yeah i think there's a it's own it's like it's impossible to get really serious when what you're competing over is who is faster at answering which president was also a supreme court justice or something like that all the while all the people in the audience are like you know people you know are people the other team knows and they're holding up signs with bad puns on them and it's not in most trivia competition is fairly good natured at this level in my experience people turn to have a good sense of humor about it because it's not fun when it gets super competitive when you start really arguing about answers and points and things like that it g s it's sort of it's a weirdly joyful sport and something you just said and even the reference to the sport sorry to interrupt but do you move up when you go to college and i'm going to assume that each of you will go to college when you graduate to is there a corresponding collegiate trivia competition there is one so it's like basketball or an athletic sport where one sport a step further is there a quiz show season do you know that starting in october you have to start getting serious about quiz show or is it so is it not organized like that so it's kind of others like that only in that the last competition even if you make it all that is the finals happens somewhere in january february so it's not so much a season as it just eventual comes to an end i would say it is sort of a schedule thing like a round i shall remember what time i got an email from italy i'm saying you know ok it's around that time we have to start preparing make a test get a team because then you have to go to super sunday which isn't the november about where all the teams out and you have to be prepared for that and up until that point that's the only thing you're working towards we don't practice for the show we practice to try out and that we practice for the show we make it in do you have  i want to take a step back in perhaps overdoing the athletic analogy but do you have anybody that you would consider to be a rival so  significantly better than us but arse still interesting competition and again we sort of we know all these people at the from quiz bowl and from quiz show meaning so it's i wouldn't exactly call them our rivals because if there's no hard feelings anywhere it's really sort of a friendly thing i'd like to change direction for just a minute because we're talking obviously about the quiz show in the quiz show team but in addition to being members of the quiz team you're you have to do your regular class work somewhere along the way right at some point yes how do you time manage it is there isn't it and i want to ask if it's an either or thing but how do you tie manage to put the work in to being successful on the quiz show team and still be a good student i can only speak personally i don't know about if it's different being a captain but personally quiz show was probably one of my least stressful and definitely one of my least time consuming extracurriculars my problem marching band also the much we went is significantly more hours and i think it's a matter of making sure you schedule so that you have a bit of time every night to set aside for your homework and bigotry can keep up as someone who does probably way too many extracurriculars i would say this is one of probably one of the easiest ones in that my school work is also my work for the show  that if i'm learning about the matter nick and martin luther i don't know of signs and cosigns that's also preparing for the us there are there will be there will be days when i have to find a new question packets to practice with our schedule meetings or make tryouts but for the most part it's not a very invasive thing on the rest of your life when we're at a time thank you for coming tonight  we've been talking with members of the mt high school of such high school quiz show team tonight and we have captain eva hill with us and we have cam or  an athletics when looking at academics one looking at community service you can access those online and at the belmont media center web site www dot media dot org thank you again for watching 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