Welcome to Free Quiz Questions

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I ran a pub quiz at my local for about six years. Being hated as I was, for the sake of universal Karma I have decided to release lots of questions I used back into the wild so that other hapless quizmasters can put them to some good use. So here, broken down into sensible categories for your easy digestion, is a lot of material for you to use for free. There are two sections to the site - the gratis stuff you can just copy and paste, and for a teeny tiny payment, you can buy a quiz pack at the brilliant website at freequizzes.co.uk where there are loads of pre-prepared packs and categories to make life much, much easier for you. They have free posters you can download to advertise in your night, and they have all sorts of themed quizzes, picture rounds and connections. Everything you could possibly want to make your crowd adore you.

My free quiz questions have been collated from various sources. It makes life a lot easier to throw a good quiz night together if you have big lists of questions available so that's simply what I present on this site. I used to sell them for a few quid a throw but there was a lot of hassle involved in managing the questions, keeping them fresh, ditributing them after a sale had been made, and worrying about refunds, electronic deliveries, returns, etc. As I only sold a very small numer of packs, people would frequently complain that they had had the same ones before, so in the end I removed those sales and put the whole system through the affiliate, so you buyers get the best service for the least hassle.

In quiz writing it's always hard to get the balance right. If your quiz questions are too hard then the contestants won't feel any satisfaction from taking part. Even teams that win a hard quiz will not come away feeling happy because they won't have expected to do well based on the number of questions they got right and felt confident about answering. They will come away feeling lucky, not intelligent. Unfortunately it is also true that if you make and easy quiz then teams will not feel challenged. If answers come to them straight away then the teams will write it down quickly and confidently and move on to talking about something else. Not always a bad thing as you probably want your quiz night to be a social event as well as test of the mind.

		It's worth saying at this point that these notes are not intended for the serious quiz leagues. I have been approached to provide a set of questions for a quiz league but I rapidly discovered it is entirely beyond my capability to devote the amount of time needed to ensure the questions are balanced so that equally difficult questions go to the team members. I used to gauge every quiz I wrote by testing it on two people before asking it to the pub. I found the best kind of questions are ones that roughly one in three people will know for sure. This gives a prospect of a chance of any team of four finding the question hard but one of them may come up with a thought in their minds that another could back up once they hear the suggestion. If you ask two people the same question and they both blurt out the answer instantly I would never include this in a quiz. If one person hesitates then I'd consider it. If both people hesitate but they arrive at the right answer then this would be an ideal question. My favourite types of question are ones that are asked for a purpose. I.e. they are things that everyone should know, and some people will be embarrased to admit that they don't. Or they are things used in everyday conversation where people do not know the derivation. Or one that it is possible to deduce from the question through logical means. Or all of the above. A good example being "What type of building gives its name to the area of London called Spitalfields?" - the answer being a hospital. There is nothing wrong with asking a question which is extremely unlikely that anyone will have the knowledge to answer but give the amunition in the question to work it out. Good examples of this type of question would be ones using acronyms, such as: "What did David Quayle and Richard Block establish in 1969?" - Swapping the surnames over creates one extra little hurdle for the pub quiz contestants to jump before realising the initials of the gentlemen would be B and Q. Another example, albeit rather easy, would be to ask "Which TV series featured the United Nations Command for Law Enforcement?". There is more advice on running a pub quiz, plus information to be found on setting general knowledge quiz questions by clicking here.

Welcome to gavinrymill.com Science and History and Genealogy

If you're researching your family tree genealogy and your family history then a fantastic resource is The Census Help website which has an excellent age-checker. You can use the homepage gadget or download a browser plugin so calculating the age in 1851 of a man born in 1797 will never require your brain again!

This section of the site features much of the very oldest stuff which probably shouldn't be still hosted on the internet. There are lots of pages which have not been updated in a long while, but also there is a lot of material including artwork which I'm quite proud of. For this reason, I'm keeping these pages running, but I apologies to the archaeological community (prehistoric and modern) for some of the stuff which is on here!

I also have other science pages, such as information on astronomy since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) met to finally answer the question: Is Pluto a Planet? I got the kick to update some of these pages. The Pluto page is featured as part of the UK dinosaurs and planetary history section. This area also includes a page on planetary geology to link in with this, plus a lot of information on the timeline of life on Earth. This site covers a massive time span from everything from the formation of planets, to how life on earth propagated, and right up to the present day. There are essentially two scales at work - the prehistoric and the modern. The former covers all the above, with lots of prehistoric pictures, and Jurassic Park pictures, including stuff from Jurassic Park III which has been recently updated with better quality pictures, and the latter is everything from the end of the neolithic onwards.

Modern historical bits of information are coming together on the earliest Britons, the timeline of English Monarchs, and information page on Hadrian's Wall. Other Roman stuff includes the details of the only known Roman circus in Britain, and the Romans in Wirral along with other associated bits compiled about our early civilizations put together largely from the wisdom of those fine messers Robinson, Aston, Harding, et al. I am also trying to build up some more iformation on the local timeline to include Wirral's Viking place names.

As part of the historical kick, I've been researching the Rymill Family Tree / family history and I'm desperately wanting input from anyone in the Oxford or Banbury area who might be able to see any vague link to our line from the information on this site. I'm looking for variations of the name of the Rymal family, Rymell family etc. The name is associated with good wines from Australia and you can have a look at the Rymill wine page which has some information about their products and how you can buy them online.

If the links above don't give you every possible quiz question you could ever want in life, then you should have a look at the website Free Quiz Questions where they are packed full of Q&A, totally for free. Their sections are divided up quite sensibly just as on this site and you'll be sure to get your pub quiz sorted in no time.

If you are generally 'Mad About History' then there's a new site coming soon which will have a host of historical information similar to the pages on this site, but it will act as a central resource for everything a history buff, or an anthusiastic amateur could ever want. The site will be a compregensive resource for people looking to buy historical clothing or find our information about a particular era, be it saxon, viking or Victorian.

The Bits and Bobs Blog

If you are interested in other online sales, one website worth visiting for all sorts of night attire, and other apparell such as stockings and hosiery is a comapny over in Birkenhead called Sexy Lingerie. They've been running for over six years and the company I used to work for was involved in lots of their graphic work for a long time, along with hosting their website. They stock high quality products from around the world including a stunning Konrad collection of lingerie sets, plus all the day-to-day stuff. They're a great site if you're looking for a gift idea because they sell vouchers, so I highly recommend having a look at that. On the subject of websites and great companies, I wish to thank our free hosting which comes courtesy of the brilliant Wirral web design company called Zarbi Ltd.

On the subject of online retail, the section I was originally building on the sales stuff has been put on hold, so gone are the toys section and there will no longer be a page linking internally to Daleks, or the other Doctor Who sections which were going to develop into a toys and retail part of the site. However if you are looking for some esotertic information on our favourite time-traveller, you could do worse than have a look at the website about the 1989 stage play of The Ultimate Adventure which was written by Terrance Dicks and had Jon Pertwee playing the Doctor. It's not the greatest work of fiction ever written and the Daleks themselves looked fairly ropey, but kids loved it and I'm sure it's remembered with a lot of fondness. If you are really into hardcore Dalek research, then you should also have a look at the www.Dalek6388.co.uk website which I first came across many years ago, and they have recently updated to become so indepth that even the biggest geeks in the world must be sweating in their anoraks at the thought of all those pieces of trivia. If you're into that sort of thing and you have a social life (which I doubt) then you'll be learning it all to repeat down the pub, to the mates you haven't got. Still on the subject of that particular Time Lord, season four of the new series of Doctor Who features the return of the Sontarans who were originally in the programme years ago, also with Jon Pertwee I think. I think it was Billie Piper who once pointed out that these monsters look like a turd in a space suit. If you don't like spoilers, then please stop reading now. Rumours abounded since Feb 08 that the end of the season would feature the return of Davros and the Daleks and it was leaked by the tabloids quite early on that he would be played in the episode The Stolen Earth by the brilliant Julian Bleach who fans first got to see in the Torchwood episode Out of the Rain. His steely gaze and throroughly evil voice make him absolutely ideal for the part. Whilst on the subject of Daleks, there is also a new website which is a resource dedicated specifically to the classic Troughton story The Evil of the Daleks. This does seem a very specific topic for a website, however given that this story has previously been voted the best ever Doctor Who adventure, and has been made into a novel and a stage play, it is obvious worth some scrutiny. Just a shame that the BBC in their wisdom have deleted the episodes so no-one will ever see it again!

I am frequently asked about memorabelia due to my connections with certain TV shows. I have occasionally been asked to identify props which is generally impossible because it means that if I'm being asked then various other people probably equally knowledgable have already been asked! There are a number of highly reputable dealers who buy and sell items from film or television sets and these sorts of things provide an excellent opportunity for fans of films to find unusual gifts and some tangle links to the stars they admire. If you are looking for a movie prop for sale then one company I would point you towards is Propmasters which is run by a great guy called David Oliver. He's been in the business for decades now, has a great online store which has recently been revamped and is generally a really nice bloke. The majority of the stuff on his site tends towards the sci fi simply because collectors tend to be that way included but you'll find everything from sit coms to romantic comedys so it's definitely worth having a look there.

I've noticed recently whilst trawling the web for a variety of services that thing which is becoming increasingly competitive is photography. There are a number of new guys popping up all over the Merseyside area and they all seem to be offering some crazy deal at a ridiculously low price in order to ensnare your custom. I generally used to think of photographers as just that - and that they generally just deal in weddings, but speaking to a couple of guys recently I've found that most of them nowadays not only know which end of a camera is which, then they also generally will do photoshop work too. The camera never lies, as they say, but with most modern picture-takers using digital now, then by default you're taking everything onto a computer afterwards where it can be manipulated before you then go on to do any developing. The Wirral photographer that I've used before is a business called HotShots and is based in Moreton and run by a really nice guy called Bernard. I bought an aerial photograph of my parents' house as a present for one of them and Bernard mounted and framed it for me. Really nice job too. Definitely worth having a look at his website and checking out what his latest deals are.

On the subject of spending money, I never cease to be amazed at the additional expenses associated with moving house. I moved hours in 2006 and it was quite a shock for me when I discovered all the extra things involved like solicitors fees and that bit wodge of money you randomly pay to the government for no reason which they call Stamp Duty. I think it dates from medieval times when the Lord of the Manor would get to Stamp on the faces of his peasants when they wanted to move house. Or maybe that isn't true. A new invention to gobble up our money when moving house is the Home Information Pack. This is a system which is designed to safe-guard unsuspecting buyers from nasty surprises. The above link will take you to a website for a brilliant company called Speed Search who provide these kinds of packs and are a very friendly and competative business. The invention of the HIP is pretty fair because the fact of the matter is that buying a house is the biggest thing you'll ever do, and doing it for the first time, as I was, you'll never fail to be astounded by the minefield involved in trying to find the money. We went to a couple of different companies for mortgage advice because we had been advised to speak to different people to ensure we had a full understanding of what was involved. There are lots of mortgage brokers around and so many offers for when you come to buy your house that you'll feel a bit overwhelmed. Just find a good independent financial adviser, one who isn't tied to any particular lender, and he should in theory find the best deal for you! Whilst you're buying a mortgage, due to the financial responsibility of keeping up with mortgage repayments many people chose this time to take out life insurnace too because if you're part of a couple and you take out a policy, then should the unthinkable happen, then you have the entire cost of your house paid for straight away. Well, under most policies anyway. Seems like a fairly sensible thing to do.