Review: InQUIZitive Tests Trivia FUNdamentals!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 1, 2013
When I received a request to review "InQUIZitive, Vol. I," I informed author Sumit Dhar (whom I do not know) he was going to have to wait a bit: I had a long line of reviews to do ahead of his. But after downloading it earlier tonight I thought I'd just briefly check it out...maybe I'd see if I could even answer a quiz question or two before I went to bed.A full hour and a half later I was about fifteen quizzes in..."InQUIZitive" is EXTREMELY infectious! Its format is simple but requires and ENCOURAGES more thought than most other trivia games out there. AS such, it also promotes thinking and problem-solving.The quizzes come in quintets: five questions appear in paragraph form in each quiz, and then, on the answer page, appear again immediately following the quiz with the answers written out below them. (I don't know that it's really necessary to repeat the questions, but I do admit it makes it a bit easier to double-check the hints given in the question.)Most of the questions give several hints to help you get the answer. I came across questions I could answer more easily than others, but I considered very few of the questions either too easy or too hard...Dhar does a good job of mixing difficulty levels. He also does a good job of blending historical, religious, cultural, literary, scientific, sports, technological, business and other type of questions together. AND the questions are cross-cultural: the questions are global in scope, and don't just focus on, say, American television or sports or Christianity, etc. There's a very wide range...though two quizzes are, in the author's words, "India Specific."One of the nice things about these questions is that they're pretty unusual, and while there are a few questions where prior knowledge CAN help, this happened RARELY, and never twice in the same quiz. Most of the questions were non-traditional, and by that I mean the kind of question that haven't appeared elsewhere, and especially not in this format. Dhar looks as if he has tried to scope out questions that are off the mainstream. By this I do NOT mean bizarre or peculiar...just off the well-beaten track.What really makes the quizzes so tempting is they ALL seem so answerable. I often throw a trivia book on the floor if I feel frustrated with either difficulty level, specificity, repetition of question type...whatever. But here that never happened: the brief quizzes give you very little chance of feeling overburdened, and the question lengths are, I believe, not only helpful to the answering process, but also give a kind of "fun fact" breezy quality, and make learning fun. Almost all of the questions had that kind of readability that make putting the book down quite difficult, as I found out.There are 40 quizzes, (plus a Bonus Quiz), so you can potentially go through the book in a few sittings, but I found the quizzes to be most enjoyable when I took the time to really try to root out the answers from the clues given. On many I was rewarded for the effort...not all, but that's the way I like it.(One additional fact I found interesting: in Mr. Dhar's request he pledged to "donate all the royalties from the book sales to Wikipedia.")