Word of the Day
Palpate (v., PAL-payte)
To examine by touching gently, often as a diagnostic tool. No, we don't know how Emperor Palpatine got his name, either.
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Link of the Day
How to write a Jeopardy! clue"
Jeopardy! has been on the air since the 1960s, cranking out 61 trivia questions each weekday. That's a lot of material for any show, but especially for a show that takes its code creation so seriously. A Jeopardy! question has a bit of an art to it, as this Popular Mechanics article details:
“There’s a saying in quiz shows,” Wisse says, “that a good question has to get one of three reactions: ‘I knew that,’ or ‘darn I should have known that,’ or ‘I didn’t know that, but now I’m glad I do.’ That’s basically what we’re looking for.”
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“In that category, the title is ‘let’s have a ball.’ The nice thing about having [a] category title that gives that much information is that then you can have shorter clues,” Wisse says. “If that category was just in a more random category, like ‘games’ or something like that, it would be tougher. But since you’re already telling them it’s a category about balls, you can have a short clue and the information needed is still going to be conveyed.” There’s a little more flexibility to be clever or coy.
You can read about the art of question-making as well as other interesting details over at Popular Mechanics.
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