Quiz on storms

Forces of nature

1 What would you call a tropical cyclone occurring in the Northwest Pacific?

2 Which work of literature is widely believed to be inspired by the wreck of the 17th-century sailing vessel, the Sea Venture, in a hurricane near Bermuda in 1609?

3 What was first devised in 1805 by a Royal Navy officer and officially adopted first on Charles Darwin’s historic voyage on HMS Beagle in the 1830s?

4 The largest storm visible to humans is an anticyclone, which has an area greater than the size of Earth. Where can it be seen?

5 What storm-related incident in America was first described in The Pennsylvania Gazette on October 1752 and then described in detail by scientist Joseph Priestley in 1767 in England?

6 In 1997, which book did Sebastian Junger write about the disastrous last voyage of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail, which went down in a huge rogue wave in October 1991?

7 A hailstorm in Darjeeling on May 8, 1909 resulted in one of the strangest cases in Indian legal history. What specifically happened in that storm?

8 The deadliest-ever storm in recorded history killed around 5,00,000 people in 1970 in erstwhile East Pakistan and eastern India. Name this storm that shared its name with the lead character of a 1968 Hindi comedy film?

9 Hurricane Carmen in 1974 was one of the deadliest storms in US history. The plot of which hugely-popular film relies on a boat being the only shrimp-catching vessel to survive Hurricane Carmen, thus generating huge profits for the owners?

10 Name the storm which started off in the Bahamas in late August 2005 as a rogue wave, and is regarded to be the costliest storm ever in American history?

Answers

1. A typhoon. It would be called a hurricane if it started in the Atlantic or Northeast Pacific Ocean and a cyclone if it originated in the South Pacific or Indian Ocean

2 . The Tempest by William Shakespeare

3 . The Beaufort Scale. Francis Beaufort later went on to set up the first meteorological office in the UK

4 . The Great Red Eye of Jupiter

5 . Benjamin Franklin’s experiments to determine the electrical charge of lightning using a kite during a storm

6 . The Perfect Storm, later made into a film in 2000 starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg

7 . The body of the Raja of Bhawal was abandoned by pall bearers on the way to the cremation. Eleven years later, a sanyasi returned to Bhawal and claimed that he was the Raja. After 21 years of litigation, he finally won the case, but died within a few days of his victory. The story is immortalised in the film Sanyasi Raja

8 . Cyclone Bhola, in November 1970

9 . Forrest Gump

10 . Hurricane Katrina, which claimed more than 1,254 lives and cost damages worth over $108 million

_{Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup; Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj}

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