New Pub Quiz Website

Quiz Pub UK

It took 4 months working 7 days a week to redesign the website and it was well worth the effort, I am so proud of the new look and I hope you like it too. If you haven't seen the website yet then this link will take you to one of the many free Quiz Questions and Answers pages, a new tab will open so you don't lose your place here.

The reason I  redesigned the website was to make it mobile friendly as the old website wasn't responsive to different screen sizes and widths, a responsive website will adjust the size of the pictures, text and even change the layout to fit perfectly on any screen.

While I was working on each of the 90 pages I took the opportunity to examine the products for that page and make sure any questions were accurate and not outdated, improve any pictures that I wasn't happy with, improved the instructions in the quiz packs and lots of other upgrades. It's nice to know that everything my customers download is perfect and that they'll be very happy with their purchases.

Accurate Quiz Questions

So far I've made 143 ready made pub quizzes and for the last 3 weeks I've been going through each of them and checking for grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes and also checking each question and answer is accurate and relevant. I've taken the trouble to add side notes to some of the questions so the quiz master can quote them making it look like they've researched the question themselves, instead of me doing it for them, here's an example: 
 In which decade was the first 'Guinness Book of Records' published and for another point in which decade was the first 'Record Breakers' TV show? 50's (1955) & 70's (15th December 1974 on BBC1)

I came across a few quiz questions that didn't have definitive answers, one such question I remember not being able to find an accurate answer to was, "Who was the first actor to be paid $1 million for 1 picture?", I found so many conflicting answers that I thought it best to remove that question altogether and choose a better one.

 At the time of writing this I'm up to checking Pub Quiz 60 so I'm 40% of the way through, but I'm not going to rush it, so I'm looking at another months work and in the mean time I'm also making a new pub quiz every week for the website to keep my existing customers happy.

 New Quiz Products

A nice new shiny website needs new content and great new products so I've been busy with that too.

 I've made multiple choice quiz packs in 3 difficulty levels, each pack took weeks to make but fortunately I made those before I started work on improving website. All I had to do was make the advertising graphics for them, here's one I made earlier.

Easy Multiple Choice Questions and Answers

 I was getting a few requests for audio music quizzes last year, what we call in the trade 'Bits & Pieces' and I was reluctant to make these as I thought it might infringe on someones copyright, however, after doing some research I found that because they are being used in a quiz and I'm only using a few seconds of each one then I'm happy that they fall into the fair use niche for educational and review purposes.

Because the quiz teams normally have to guess the title of the song in a bits and pieces music quiz the chorus or the best part of each song is never used, a lot of the time it's just a few riffs from a guitar, or a distinctive drum beat. Apart from using these in a quiz they have absolutely no value anywhere else so I'm happy I'm not ripping anyone off and I'm even using CD's that I purchased myself so the artist has already been paid.

Audio Music Quizzes

We get a lot of customers that want these extra bonus rounds to liven up their quiz nights such as Dingbats, Rebus Puzzles and Catchphrase picture quizzes that we already have on offer. A while back I made a quite a few speed quizzes, these involve handing out a sheet of paper and telling the quiz teams that they have 3 minutes to write down as many James Bond movies that they can think of for example, the team who gets the most wins some bonus points. After reviewing all the speed quizzes I found a few of them were dated and decided to remake all of them excluding any I didn't think were much fun to play and replacing them with much better ones.

Speed Quiz

I've hosted these speed rounds in my own quiz nights and they've gone down very well, I get lots of people come up to me at the end of the quiz praising it which gives me confidence knowing that my website customers are going to be happy with them too.

The Pub Quiz Website Content

Not everyone wants to do a fun quiz, there are a lot of people who simply want questions, maybe they're doing a quick quiz for charity or they only need 10 or 20 quiz questions for a party. Because I want to cater to everyone and keep my visitors entertained I've put a huge amount of effort into making pages and pages of free quiz questions and answers and adding fun facts and short articles accompanied by videos and so on. Each page is in effect an article, a very interesting article too and very valuable if you are looking for information, as a matter of fact these pages of free quiz questions get the most visitors, roughly 1 million visits a year! It took me a day to make each page, please take a look at this example page: Pub Quiz Questions

So, that's what I've been up to and why you haven't seen me write any blogs for a long time, before that I was making my quiz app and that took over 2 years to do and also prevented me from writing on this blog. Anyhow I'm back now so you can look forward to lots of free quiz stuff and interesting articles for you to get quiz material from, if you've never visited this blog before then scroll down or select older blogs in the archive at the top of the page on the right. I hope you find something interesting that you can use, if you do please leave comments so I know my articles are being appreciated, thanks.

Game Show Adventure Quiz & Puzzle game

What is Game Show Adventure?

Created by Quiz Pub UK 2016

Concept

At Quiz Pub UK I have amassed a considerable amount of fun trivia, fun facts, puzzles and so on that I create weekly to put into my quiz packs for pubs to download. The website ticks over but doesn't make much money, not enough for the amount of work I put into research and writing the quizzes, each quiz takes me 2 or 3 days to create.

So, I thought it would be a good idea to create a quiz game that I could put all my trivia into. It took about 3 months to learn the basics of Lua which is the language of Android. Several more months to learn Corona SDK and create the basics of the game and type out thousands of questions, plus I had to create four possible answers for each one, it was a mammoth task.

The Question Round - Knowledge

Knowledge

This took about 3000 hours working day and night, it was so monotonous and took a lot of concentration. Every question was hand picked and sorted into easy, medium and hard. Then each answer was checked to see if it was accurate. I purposely only chose questions that any native English speaking person in the world would have a chance of answering, not an easy task.

The Pyramid

The Aztec Pyramid

I decided early on that I wanted the rounds in the game to be displayed as a pyramid that you worked your way to the top to win the game. This made me think of adding a few different games in between the knowledge rounds to mix things up a bit so I went for a word game called Conundrum and a TV game show called Catchphrase. More on those games later. I put a shop at the end of each level for the players to spend what they had earned on buying lives and passes or trying to win them in one of the 9 different gamble games.
I re-drew that pyramid over 20 times over the last 2 years because I kept changing the games! This is the easy pyramid, the Aztec Zone where everything is tropical and so is the music. I then thought of pyramid locations for the medium and hard zones, I could only think of two, Egypt and Las Vegas so I went with those. As you can imagine, I've already started to create a monster project for myself. I have to create everything myself, I can't afford to pay anybody anything I'm just about surviving, just! I'm no artist and I've not really been much of a graphic artist but for the game to be taken seriously I knew I had to put a lot of effort into making the graphics as top notch as I can. In the end I've made over 1200 high definition graphics for Game Show Adventure. I'm quite proud of my frog.

Frog created by Magical Games 2016

Conundrum word puzzle

 Conundrum

Here's an interesting game, a hard game for many people in fact. What I did was picked a word, any word and mixed up the letters to try and form a new word or a sentence. This method hides the original word very well and is very off putting. Because this game can be so annoying I put clue tokens in the game to give you a clue to what the original word is you're looking for. This took considerable effort on my part creating hundreds of anagrams in easy, medium and hard, not only that but I had to check that you couldn't make another word out of each one too, I'm glad I've done it and been so thorough, it's one game I won't have to add to at a later date.

Catchphrase

Catchphrase puzzle game

I'm just a sucker for punishment, I knew what I was getting myself into, basically I was creating an entire app as only one small part of my overall game. In case you've never seen the TV show Catchphrase, contestants are shown an animated picture that is trying to purvey a well known saying or phrase, song title or product. I started off by reading lots and lots of phrases and picking the ones I could translate in pictures. The best way to work out the word is to start by looking at the blank words, in the screen shot you can see it's made up of two words. Then look at the each blank word to see how long each one is. This will help you when looking at the picture, the first picture is a stage like you would see in a theater. Behind this is a train station. See if you can figure out the phrase before I give you the answer.

I did some clever programming in this game. I made the code strip all the spaces out of the phrase, then take out all the repeat letters, then add random letters to make up 10 and display them at the bottom of the screen for the players to tap, like a small keyboard, that you use to fill in the blank tiles in the middle of the screen.

The catchphrase in the picture is Play Station.

For your enjoyment here are two of the catchphrases taken straight from the game, I've made 100 of these so far and soon I'll be adding a hundred more. 

 

 Deal or No Deal

I've called this game Open the Box to avoid any copyright issues with the TV game show Deal or No Deal. I've also gone to the trouble to make the boxes different and the amount of them too. This game is at the very top of the pyramid so when you get here you can relax. I spent a lot of time on the graphics in this game as you can see in the screen shot. If you've never seen this game on the TV then it's a simple case of choosing a box for yourself, then proceeding to open the others and getting offers for your box each time. Can you win the million? If you do you get a trophy to add to your trophy room. At this point my game has a definite theme, game shows hence the name Game show Adventure!

I've only scratched the surface so far! I've created other types of puzzles and arcade style games far too many to mention in this already very long blog page. If you are really interested in learning more about this game then visit the website here Game Show Quiz and Puzzle Game.

If you have an Android tablet or phone then you can try the first pyramid in my game for free and if you like it you can unlock the other two pyramids for a very small price.

The Android Game

You can download the full Android game here Game Show

• Multiplayer - 1 to 4 players.
• 1200+ High Definition graphics.
• Nearly 100 Sound effects and backing tracks.
• Hundreds of puzzle games.
• Thousands of quiz questions covering every topic.
• Mazes, word searches, spot the difference and more!
• Classic arcade games like Frogger™ and Pac-Man™
• Classic board games like Connect Four™ and Simon™
• Gamble games like British slots and Roulette.
• TV Game Shows like Deal or No Deal™, Catchphrase™ and more!

For an in depth tutorial on how to master this massive Game Show Adventure then tap this Best Android Quiz App 2016

 

The history of tea and interesting facts about tea

The History of Tea

I've read somewhere that tea was an accidental discovery, like most discoveries are,
by a Chinese Emperor Shen Nung who was drinking hot water in his garden when
some tea leaves accidentally blew into his cup from a nearby tree.

Of course the story is so old that it could be a myth and no-one knows for sure.
One argument is did India or China discover tea first, from what I've read there is
a high probability that tea did in fact get discovered in China first.
Where did the saying Cha come from? Cha is a Chinese character that was added
to the language in A.D.3 specifically to describe hot water infused with tea leaves.
And to bolster the argument further it was many centuries later that tea plants were
imported into to Calcutta from China to begin mass cultivation for the British market.

How about the tea bag?

 

Another misconception is that Tetley's invented the tea bag,
well they didn't, in fact they didn't start making tea bags until
nearly 50 years after they were being widely used in the USA.
The tea bag was invented by an American named Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea merchant, who started to send samples of tea to his customers in small silken bags in 1908 and the concept quickly caught on as a convenient and less messy way to make a cuppa.




It was Tetley in 1953 that drove the introduction of tea bags in Britain, in the 60's
tea bags only made up 3% of all tea drunk in the UK, this was due mainly to the
fact that Britons returning from the US would tell horror stories of being served a
luke warm cup of water with a tea bag on the side.
Anyhow, Tetley managed to sway the British public and completely reversed the
way they made their tea, by dispensing of the string attached to the bag so it could
be allowed to move freely in the teapot, now only 3% of tea is made with loose leaves!

Why do we add milk to our tea?

In the early years green tea was the tea of choice but tea was expensive
which lead some greedy and unscrupulous traders to add other leaves to mix some of
which were poisonous. This lead to black tea becoming more popular and because
black tea is more bitter people added milk and sugar to make it taste better.

Health benefits of tea

Of all the studies that have been made about tea there have never been found any
harmful effects, in fact tea has less caffeine than coffee.
Tea has been shown to reduce cholesterol, combat diabetes, cancer and even promote
weight loss. Tea is packed with antioxidants and is good for circulation thus is
good for your heart and brain, it even reduces the lung damage caused by smoking.

Which is the best tea to drink?

All of them! Although, like most foods, the more processed it is the less of the good
stuff it contains even the most processed teas are still very good for you.
Here is a list of popular teas by order of highest to lowest anti-oxidizing powers.

 

 

 

 

 

List Of Tea's

 

White Tea

Uncured and UN-fermented. One study showed that white tea has the most potent
anticancer properties compared to more processed teas.

Green Tea

The leaves are steamed in production, they have a high concentration of flavonoids
and are well studied. Green tea has been shown to combat the growth of bladder,
breast, lung, stomach, pancreatic, and colon cancers. Prevent clogging of the
arteries and burn fat. Relieve oxidizing stress on the brain, reduce risk of neurological
disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, reduce risks of stroke and improve
cholesterol levels.

Black Tea

Made with fermented tea leaves, black tea has the highest caffeine content and
studies have shown that black tea may protect lungs from damage caused by exposure
to cigarette smoke. It also reduces the risk of brain diseases.
So there you have it, everything you need to know about tea and plenty of facts you
can use in your quizzes. What next? Put the kettle on of course.
Cha for now.

True or False Quiz Questions

True or False

Good day fellow quizzers.
I've been really really busy lately with keeping the Facebook Pub Quiz page engaging and fun.
Writing new pub quizzes for the pub quiz website every week but the biggest time consumer by far is the
quiz app I've been working on, which never seems to be near completion.
So it's been a while since I've posted anything on this pub quiz blog and I thought
I'd better make the effort today to at least write something.

I'm going to give you a list of true or false questions for you to have a go at and then
at the end I'm going to give you the answers plus a bit more info to go with each one
so you will leave this article more enlightened and a little more educated.
Let's see if you can get 10 out of 10.

True or False Questions

1. A butterfly has four wings?
2. Luke Skywalker was Princess Leia's brother?
3. On a bottle of wine spumante means sweet?
4. Twiki was a robot in Battlestar Galactica?
5. The famous magician Harry Houdini was Italian?
6. Walt Disney’s Seven Dwarfs worked in a gold mine?
7. Blue is the most common eye colour in the world?
8. Tarantula bites are deadly to the human beings?
9. Sony produced the first battery powered cassette recorder?
10. Bats always turn left when they leave a cave?

OK, so that didn't take long but did you think about those questions long enough?
Maybe you should go through them again just to make sure, you do want to
get full marks don't you? I do love true or false questions because they make you
think, "is it true or is it a myth?" or is the quiz master trying to trick me?
I ask my friend these sorts of questions all the time and he never believes me most
of the time, he then goes home and looks it up on the internet to make sure I'm not
pulling his leg.
Anyhow, let's get on to the answers.

True or False Answers

1. True, a butterfly does have four wings.
Did you also know that the original name for the butterfly was flutterby? Seems
hard to believe doesn't it? But it's true!
The origin of the name butterfly, is a fly that eats butter. Going even further back,
to the dutch origin, "Butter Shitter", because the dutch thought the insect pooped on the butter.
Did you know butterflies taste with their feet?

2. True, they both have the same father, Darth Vader!

3. False, The word spumante, which means foaming in Italian, is a general term used for
almost any type of sparkling wine made in Italy, while one that is sweet will be called dolce.

4. False, Twiki was the robot in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, who's catchphrase was,
"biddi-biddi-biddi, hey Buck.."
followed by some funny 20th century slang he picked up from Buck Rogers.

5. False, Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-American illusionist and stunt performer,
noted for his sensational escape acts.

6. False, Walt Disney’s Seven Dwarfs, named Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful,
Sneezy and Dopey worked in a diamond mine.
The Seven Dwarfs finish their digging work for the day, singing the "Dig, Dig" song..
"We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
In a mine the whole day through.
We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
It's what we like to do.
It ain't no trick. To get rich quick. If you dig, dig, dig, with a shovel or a pick.
In a mine. In a mine. In a mine. In a mine.
Where a million diamonds shine."

7. False, brown is the most common eye colour in the world.
Brown eyes range from light brown or honey to almost black.
Light brown or amber eyes are common in many ethnicities including among Africans,
Asians and Caucasians. Genetically brown appears to be more dominant than other eye colors,
hence its prevalence.

Blue eyes are quite rare and are becoming less common. A few generations ago 30% of those
born had blue eyes; now that number has decreased to about one in six.
This eye color is often found among people of European descent.

Grey eyes are a variant of blue eyes, only much lighter.
Grey eyes often include a combination of other tints including light blue or greenish.

Green eyes are among the most rare eye color and only about 2% of people possess green eyes.
They are typically found among people with Germanic or Slavic origins.

8. False, if a tarantula bites you, you may have pain at the site of the bite similar to a bee sting.
The area of the bite may become warm and red. On extreemly rare occassions, like if you are
allergic to venom, a tarantula bite might become fatal.

9. False, although Sony is famous for the Walkman the first company was Phillips.
Phillips was founded in May 15, 1891, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

10. Depends where you live!
True, Bats do indeed always turn left when they leave their cave in the Northern hemisphere.
False, Bats always turn right when they leave their cave in the Southern hemisphere.
This is due to the coriolis effect, the same force which causes hurricanes and tornadoes to rotate
counter-clockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of the equator.
This effect is an inertial force caused by the earth's rotation.   

So there you have it, did you learn something new today?
Please leave a comment if you enjoyed this article, it's always nice to know my hard work is
appreciated. If you enjoy these types of fun facts then you will definitely like my Facebook page
facebook.com/quizpubuk
Why not sign in to your Facebook account and like my page so you can get my daily posts.

Free Quiz Questions

Free quiz questions and Answers

It's been a little while since I posted some of my free quiz questions and I'm going to treat you to some here that you will not see anywhere else, how do I know you won't find them anywhere else? Because I made these quiz questions myself, that's why.

The Questions

1.   What have Winston Churchill and Popeye got in common?
2.   The midpoint of the year occurs in which month?
3.   True or False, Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was named after Dolly Parton?
4.   What was the first full-length movie made entirely on computer?
5.   In which bat and ball game is it illegal to play a volley?
6.   What do Americans call what the English call “Tights”?
7.   Which two of these are naturally non magnetic, Lead, Iron, Copper & Nickel?
8.   True or False, you are more likely to get flooded than burgled in the UK?
9.   Which 2013 space walk film starred Sandra Bullock & George Clooney?
10. In the Fawlty Towers Gourmet Nights episode what was given “a damned good thrashing”?
11. What are the 6 people's first names in the Phonetic Alphabet?
12. Which is the biggest country, by area, in the European Union?
13. Which 5 letter word is still pronounced the same with the last 4 letters removed?
14. True or False, Horatio Nelson suffered with sea-sickness his whole life?
15. What was the name of the fictional village in the UK TV show Noel’s House Party?
16. Which is the only natural food that does not go bad?
17. How many of the 4 U.S. states that begin with "New" can you name?
18. On a Monopoly board, what colour is Pall Mall?
19. Which is the only planet not named after a God?
20. Who is protected by the Swiss Guard?

The Answers

1.   Tattoo of an anchor
2.   July 2nd Midday (non leap year)
3.   True
4.   Toy Story
5.   Table Tennis
6.   Pantyhose
7.   Lead & Copper
8.   True
9.   Gravity
10.Basil’s car
11. Charlie, Juliet, Mike, Oscar, Romeo & Victor
12. France
13. Queue
14. True
15. Crinkly Bottom
16. Honey
17. New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico & New York
18. Pink
19. Earth
20. The Pope

Please post kind comments if you enjoyed these questions and answers and if you'd like me to post some more. I hope you enjoyed them.

Brain Teaser 4 Lateral Thinking

Fun Puzzles

Hello quizzers.
To solve todays puzzle will require some lateral thinking on your part. It only took me 5 minutes to solve when I first saw this brain teaser and I remember being well chuffed when I finally worked it out.
How long will it take you?
As usual I'm not going to give you the solution until somebody posts a reply, enjoy!

Brain Teaser 3, puzzles are fun!

Brain Teasers For Fun

Hello fellow quizzer, I hope you're having a nice time reading my interesting blogs here on Blogger today.
In this article I'm going to give you 2 brain teasers taken from 2 of my pub quizzes.
I will reveal the answers when some of you post a reply and have a guess, until then enjoy!

Brain Teaser 1

Two Mafia bosses were sat at a bar drinking scotch on the rocks one fine summer evening in New York.
Unknown to them one of their enemies had instructed the bar man to poison all their drinks.
One of the Mafia bosses drank a lot faster than the other one, infact he drank 5 glasses of Scotch by the time the other one had only drunk 1 glass of Scotch!
The boss that had only drunk one glass died on the spot, but the other boss that drank 5 glasses felt no ill effects at all even though all his drinks had been poisoned in exactly the same way, how can this be?

Brain Teaser 2

You might want to get some match sticks or tooth picks and set them out as in the picture below, it might make it easier for you to solve, see how long it takes you.

All my pub quiz packs that I make for pubs include puzzles and brain teasers just like the two examples above, it gives the quiz teams something to keep them entertained before the quiz starts.
I will be posting more soon so if you enjoyed these then why not bookmark this page, recommend it on Google, share it on Facebook or Twitter right now? Just click the buttons below, go on, help me out.