My group received the following e-mail from Mr. Steven De Ceuster, the Director for Western Europe of International Quizzing Association (IQA).  IQA established the World Quizzing Championship with the aim of elevating quizzing or quiz bee to the level of other “mind” games such as chess or poker. 
We’ve been in constant touch with this International Group and finally, they agreed to hold a Philippine elimination to determine who will represent the Philippines in the World Quiz Championship.  The elimination will be this June 7, anybody who are interested may send me a message.   Perhaps you have what it takes to be ranked among the legends of Philippine quiz bee, such as Bong Barrameda, Ramon Lorenzo, Leonardo Gapol and Richard Pante.
By the way, I am not competing (or might take the qualifying exam just to know the type of questions) because I am preparing for my muay thai fight this June.  And I also have a business trip from June 4 to 7.
 
“I am Steven De Ceuster from Belgium and am IQA Director Western Europe. I currently handle the applications from new possible member countries.
  
We were intrigued by your query and would like to know more. You seem pretty sure of the skill level of your countrymen and it would be great to have another strong country participating. Please be
aware though that the top ranked players from previous years are professional quiz players and probably cannot be compared to participants in pub quizzes in your country.
  
I guess you already read about the IQA on websites, but let me repeat some of the sites on which most of the information can be
found:
 
-        IQA UK: http://www.iqagb.co.uk/trivia/portal.php
-        IQA Belgium: www.iqa.be
-        Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Quizzing_Championships
 
The most interesting event for you guys would be the World Quizzing Championships that will next take place on June 7th. I added some smaple question in attachment from a previous event (this was however not the final version of the
questions, some syntax or other errors might still be there, don’t worry about them; because it are sample questions they will not be perfectly balanced over all subjects / regions).
 
Before that there will also be the 2nd Trans-Atlantic Quiz, which is a UK-USA challenge (but other countries can participate too), with an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon culture. The TAQ will take place on March 15.
 
If you want to know more, please contact me.
 
 
Let me elaborate a bit:
 
(Take care: lengthy e-mail coming up)
 
 
Let me first give you some information on the IQA and the upcoming 5th World Quizzing Championships.
 
The IQA was founded a couple of years ago by quiz enthusiasts from different countries and has grown over the years to include more and more countries. Most members of the IQA are representative from the official quiz
federation of their country, or if there is no official federation, of the biggest quiz organisation of their country. Founding members were the UK, Belgium, India and Estonia, who were later joined by the USA, the
Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Finland, Norway, Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Liberia, Lithuania and
Australia. Talks are underway with Canada, Ireland and Latvia. People from other countries like Rumania, New Zealand and Argentina have participated in events but as inidividuals rather than official reps of their nations.
 
The aim of the IQA is to elevate quiz to a similar status as other mind-sports like chess and bridge. For that reason we have been working with quiz organisations from around the globe to develop and run international events. Until now 9 such events have taken place: 4 times a European Championship and 4 times a World Championship (plus a test event in England in 2003) and once a Trans-Atlantic Quiz (TAQ). All the time with increased media
attention.
 
At the moment we are particularly active in organising the next World Quizzing Championships (WQC) that will take place on June 7th of this year.
 
 We would be delighted for a quiz organisation to organise a leg of the next WQC in the Philippines, possibly as a first step to membership.
 
 
1. WORLD QUIZZING CHAMPIONSHIPS  (WQC)
 
 
1a. What is the WQC?
 
The WQC is an inidividual written quiz that is organised around the globe at the same time. In
Western Europe the time is 3pm to 5pm on June 3rd (which means it will be morning in Canada, evening in India, late evening in Malaysia; for countries like Australia where this would be past midnight, a difference of max 3 hours is allowed).
 
The quiz consists of 240 questions, to be answered in a maximum allowed time of 90 minutes. The questions are divided over 8 categories of 30 questions each, as listed below:
 
* Culture            comprises    Fine Art, Architecture, Religion/Mythology,…
* Entertainment                   Pop Music, Classical Music, Television,…
* Media                           Film, Literature, Comics, Language,…

 

* History                         History, Current Affairs,…
* Sciences                        Exact Sciences, Social Sciences, Flora, Fauna
* World                           Geography, Technology, Transport,…
* Sports                          Sports, Games, Records,…
* Lifestyle                       Food&Drink, Fashion, Tourism, Design,…
 
The total score of an individual is the sum of the best 7 categories. So the worst category can be dropped (this was originally done to attract more women to the competition so
they could drop ‘Sports’ and now it is part of the rules). The result on the worst category however will be taken into account in case of an ex aequo.
 
To assure fairness, the knowledge of English (or any other language) should not be a deciding factor. That’s why for the WQC all questions will be translated to the native language of the participants. In Belgium most people get the questions in Dutch, in Finland in Finnish etc. They will all be allowed to answer in there native language too. The only question that remains is who will do the translation of your local language (Tagalog?). You can also opt to use English as lingua franca as they do in India.
 
1b. How is the local organisation done?
The people participating in the event, will have to be assembled in one venue to ensure there is no foul play (like working in groups, taking more than the alloted time, using reference works or the internet). Possibly a proctor will be appointed by the IQA.
 
The first thing to do is to designate a country representative. This guy will coordinate things in that country and will normally not participate. IN later stages, he/she could be involved in the
voting for the question selection (see 1c).
 
So what then needs to be done, is renting a venue, advertise the event among the country’s quiz players and get the inscriptions going. If you are able to get a cheap venue  that would be great.
 
In that venue, you’d need a PC to be able to e-mail the results as soon as possible after the completion of the quiz. We also use a computer projector to make it a bit nicer, but that is not a necessity.
 
Obviously, a big
country can have multiple venues (India will have at least 4 this year: Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Calcutta, the USA may have 10 this year), but in every venue we need a trustworthy person to oversee the event and send the scores.
 
The idea is that within 1-2 hours after the end of the event the complete scores are e-mailed to some central location (normally in the UK) where they are all processed and the results are then re-distributed to the
various venues so everywhere the result can be announced.
 
 
1c. Where do the questions come from?
The set of 240 questions, divided over 8 different categories, is made by an international team of professional or semi-professional question setters. At the last WQC the team comprised of one person from the UK, one from Estonia, one from India, one from the USA, one from Sri Lanka and one from Belgium (yours truly). The team makes sure that every subject is represented and also that the questions are fairly spread geographically (for instance special precautions are made that not too much emphasis is laid on Anglo-American culture, but that also questions on for instance French, German, Spanish but also African and Asian subjects are fairly evenly represented).
 
The questions that were set, are then sent to the country responsibles (if desired) who can vote what questions actually will make the quiz (we normally make 3x too many questions) and in some cases can veto questions which they deem would give an unfair advantage to any given country.
 
All the questions are originally set in English, but are translated to the native language of the quiz players (Except in India, where because of the multitude of languages English is used as lingua franca).
 
For this year’s event we are already far in the making of the questions. The voting will probably take place around April.
 
1d. Previous events
From 2004 to 2007 the WQC took place in venues
ranging from the Manchester United Stadion, the Silverstone Formula-1 circuit to a living room in Kuala Lumpur.
 
  
I look forward to your reply.
  
 
Kind regards,
 
Steven De Ceuster
IQA Belgium