Every Tuesday for the past few weeks, we have been attending Cooper’s Bar for Quiz Night. Essentially, what happens is that there are a number of teams, and the bartenders give us 40 questions to answer and then if your team does really well or really poorly, you win prizes. It’s been a fun activity and we have tried making it a regular thing. The only problem that I have with it is that we are in a sports bar, so of course, most of the questions are sport related and that is one of the areas that I know nothing about. I have some knowledge of the mariners and the sonics (when I was a child my aunt and uncle watched them all the time…when they were good), but they generally ask football questions about a specific person, what position he played, what’s his number, etc. No idea. I suck at those questions.

Well, this last Tuesday, one of the first things that the bartender said was, “So, we have a lot of science question tonight.” John, Greg, Chantel and I all yelled, “Yes!” following this comment. Tommy then looked at us and said, “That’s right, we have four scientists at the table!” Needless to say, we were thrilled.

They started asking questions and we were writing down the correct answers and all giggled when the bartender pronounced “Mendeleev” incorrectly. We watched and laughed as John wrote down the answers to the Darwin questions before the bartender had even finished asking the question. It only became tricky when they started asking questions that scientifically did not make sense or were debatable. The one that got me the most was: “How much of the planet is composed of water?” First off, it’s changing due to melting of the ice caps/glaciers = increase in sea-level, so there is no universal answer. In most of my classes, I have been told that it is somewhere between 70-75%, leaning more towards 75%. Of course, this type of question being asked in bar, is going to have a universal answer. They thought it was 70%. We said 75%.

The main question that got John was the number of classifications/kingdoms of life. This is a debatable question. In high school, you are taught that there are 5: Protista, Monera, Animalia, Fungae and Plantae. However, in recent years they have decided to remove the classification Monera and replace it with Archaea and Eubacteria. This officially is 6, not 5. John went up to ask the bartender for a verification on this question, and the guy’s response was, “The modern definition.” Obviously, we put 6, and he wanted 5.

This was extremely frustrating to us considering that the questions they asked were not worded properly for scientists, and thus we didn’t do as well as we had thought.

As John and I walked home, we discussed it a little bit further, and decided that there is no point in getting frustrated with it considering that they are not scientists, they are bartenders. Not to be rude to them at all, it’s just that based upon those questions, it was apparent that they had not had any college level science classes.

We are still planning on going, it is a lot of fun. I think that the best part for me this last Tuesday was that I felt like I was finally contributing to the group, which has been difficult for me on previous Tuesdays.