Patna: Poser 1: A large number of what creatures die in Gujarat every January, increasingly so in the last few years because of a more "effective" Chinese product than its traditional counterpart?
Side note: The Gujarat government launched a campaign to save the creatures. What creatures, and what's causing the deaths?
Answer: Birds and kites.
This was one of the questions from Venkatesh Srinivasan in the Environ Quiz organised by Bihar State Pollution Control Board at Adhiveshan Bhavan here on Tuesday to mark World Environment Day celebrations.
Total 212 teams and 636 people huddled together in the hall, testing their trivia skills for the top honours.
The organisers even had to stop registration at one point of time considering the turnout for the open-to-all quiz. Some of the participants, not lucky enough to grab a seat, sat on the floor. Each team had three members.
At the end of the show, Calcutta teams Last Action Heroes and Earth-Shastra came first and second. Modern Climate - a team from Gyan Niketan School comprising Anurag, Rudransh Raj and Rishav Kunal came third.
The prize distribution will be held on Wednesday.
"City-based quizzers and participants from Calcutta, IIT- Kharagpur and Delhi University came for the quiz. We didn't expect this kind of participation," said pollution control board chairman Ashok Ghosh.
Another question at the quiz went like this - India currently has more than 400,000 of these, which consume about 2 billion litres of diesel per year. Each consumer an average 5 kilowatts of power and the consumption increases with the number of users. One of the companies in this industry is the second largest buyer of diesel in India.
The answer: Cellphone towers.
"We had an exciting quiz day. There was mammoth participation in the quiz which basically revolved around the theme of environment," said quizmaster Venkatesh Srinivasan, the co-founder of Bangalore-based Nexus Consulting. "The last round was based on this year's World Environment Day theme 'Beat the plastic pollution'. All the questions were on plastic. There was no negative marking in this round, and the team which did best in the prelims emerged the winner."
Those who failed to walk away victorious were also happy for the opportunity.
"This was an amazing experience. I teamed up with my grandfather, and answered a lot of questions. I don't mind losing as I got to learn many new things. My bond with my grandfather grew stronger too," said Aman Raj.
