By Phoebe Watson and Molly Flynn
Aquinas College 1 – Phoebe Watson, Molly Flynn (Year 8), Monique Faire and Beth Mosley (Year 7).
Regionals – Tuesday 21st May
Aquinas enters the Kids Lit Quiz every year, just for fun. We have never won not until now. Us, Aquinas College 1 were the first Aquinas team to win the regional heat of the Lit Quiz. There were 10 rounds of 10 questions. No team knew the categories of each round before they arrived at Tauranga Intermediate for the Quiz. The 10 categories were Beginnings, Blindness, Books within Books, Colours, Confectionary, Fictional Characters, Marriage, Survival, Unicorns and Vegetables. We won the first round after having a play off against 2 other schools. After that we won other rounds but your team can only win the prizes once. At the halfway break we were first equal with Awakeri School (previous Lit Quiz winners). Throughout the Quiz we moved up and down the scoreboard. At the end we were first equal with Tauranga Intermediate 1 but the Quizmaster Wayne Mills did not want a tie. So, there was a sudden death play-off with one deciding question which Monique won for us. This meant we were off to Wellington for the Nationals in 4 days time! Luckily, we also won some prize money to help with travel and accommodation costs.
Nationals – Sunday 26th May
We met at Aquinas at 8 am on Saturday the 25th of May to begin the drive down to Wellington. As we had little time to prepare, we listened to War Horse on the way. After stops in Turangi and Waiouru for some photos at the Army Museum we arrived in Wellington. Sunday morning started with breakfast at Joe’s Garage before Mass at Saint Mary’s of the Angels. After mass we went to Te Papa Museum for about an hour to look at the Gallipoli and new Nature exhibitions. Then it was time to head to the National Library for the quiz. The National final quizzes are structured very differently to the Regional heat quizzes. There were only 5 rounds but 15 questions in each. Again, all the categories were unknown by everyone until the questions were asked. The questions are very differently structured. They start off quite obscure but gradually become more obvious. As soon as you know the answer you press the buzzer in the middle of the table. If you were the first person to press the buzzer, the buzzer would go green, if not the buzzer would turn red. If you got a question correct you would be awarded 2 points and if you got a question wrong, it would be -1 point. So there was a lot of pressure on all the teams. Our regional heat was on the evening of Tuesday the 21st of May and the National finals were on Sunday the 26th of May. The Team that sat next to us at Nationals was from Dunedin. They said that their regionals had been a month before the National Finals so we were at an unfair disadvantage. The Nationals were far harder than we expected, so we did not do as well as we had hoped. However, we came to the LIT Quiz to have fun and that we did. We have gained so much from this valuable experience and cannot wait to give it another crack next year.
You must be logged in to post a comment.