Christmas Quiz

It’s that time of the year when TV can be particularly uninspiring. Children, grand-children, and even sometimes your good self might end up with a few hours to fill. Please feel free to pass on to anyone you know who enjoys quizzes – no prior knowledge is required.
The quizzes are all ‘straight’ – there are no horrible tricks which result in a groan when you are told the answer. One of the quizzes will appeal to people who like word games, another is a logic problem, and the final one concerns numbers.
Any smart teenager aged between 13 and 123 should be able to make a stab at one of them at least. Hints and ultimately answers will be found in attachments to this post. No prizes, other than for proving how smart you are!

Please don’t post you answers here and spoil it for anyone else. The answers are safely tucked away in attachments below.

Quiz 1 – Word play

Not counting the rather dubious ‘Cantilevered Shh’, there are 13 true two-word anagrams of the phrase ‘Save the Children’. Your job is to find them using the clues provided, and not the internet!
As an example, the clue ‘Gave birth to cry baby (7,’ would mean that the first word of the answer has seven letters and the second has eight. You might be able to guess that ‘Hatched’ could mean ‘Gave birth to’ and all the letters of ‘hatched’ are in the phrase ‘Save the Children’ That will leave you with eight letters left over verlesni, and you can work out that’s an anagram of ‘sniveler’, meaning cry-baby. So Hatched sniveler would be the answer.
Here are clues to the other twelve pairs of words:
• Rank musical interval (8,7)
• Perry from friends London tea-leaves (8,7)
• Singer scruff (7,
• Lead articles about pea (10,5)
• Rushed parsley (8,7)
• Gathered symbiotic organism (9,6)
• Purple marries (8,7)
• Indentured knotter (8,7)
• Doped heart chamber (7,
• Candle sellers steal (9,6)
• Inflexible peas (8,7)
• Bisect named (5,10)

If you get stuck, the answers are posted in an attachment below

Quiz 2 – Logic challenge

At the most recent Alumni Association social, five alumni decided to re-kindle their old friendship and arranged to meet for a Christmas Curry with their partners in town one evening.
The ten people all arrived on time, and as is the way with these things, there was a short interlude before they sat down where people shook hands and introduced themselves
One of the people – and only one – happened to have started their career at SC in logistics, and they were intrigued as to how many acts of hand shaking had just taken place. So they asked the other nine people how many people they had just shaken hands with, and found out:
• Naturally, no one had shaken hands with their own partner,
• All the hand-shaking had been entirely conventional two-person hand-shakes (there were no chains of three etc),
• Finally, the nine people all gave a different answer between zero and eight (one person said zero, one person said one, up to one person said eight)
The question you have to solve, based solely on the above information, is with how many people did the logistician’s partner shake hands?
This is not a trick question; it’s pure logic, and there is sufficient information above to work it out. If you get stuck, there will be a clue in the attachments, and an answer if you give in.

Quiz 3 – Grant Funding

Save the Children, Oxfam and MSF had agreed to jointly fund a hospital project in Ruritania. They were asked to budget a total of £300,000 for the hospital, so each paid up front £100,000.
However, because of excellent local management, the final bill comes in at only £250,000 so the hospital management team met with the three donors to decide what to do with the £50,000 left over.
After much discussion, it was decided to split the £50,000. £10,000 would be returned to each of the three primary donors, and the remaining £20,000 would be spent on medical equipment.
Everyone went away happy until the Save the Children team went to account to their Finance department.
The Finance manager said ‘So we paid £100,000 minus £10,000 is £90,000. There’s three of us each paying that, so we’ve paid £270,000 in total. You’ve told me they spent an extra £20,000 on medical equipment. £270,000 plus £20,000 is £290,000. But we started off with £300,000. Where’s the missing £10,000?’
Quiz-1-Answers.pdfQuiz-2-Hard-Hint.pdfQuiz-2-Hint-2.pdfQuiz-2-Answer.pdfQuiz-3-Answer.pdf