Johns Hopkins Magazine - April 1996 Issue

Playing Games

By "Guido Veloce"
I have recently spent a great deal of time in airports and on airplanes. In other words, I've been bored. A saving grace of the experience was coming to appreciate the dumb little puzzles and games in the back of airline magazines and in newspapers. When I ran out of those, I decided to make up two of my own, knowing that readers of the Johns Hopkins Magazine also travel and have other kinds of mind-numbing experiences, like long calls with relatives and gainful employment. True to their genre, these quizzes are meant to pass the time until the fog lifts, the equipment failure is fixed, the phone call ends, or it is time to go home. Unlike computer games, they won't make embarrassing blipping sounds in the background. You can even pretend to be lost in thought if you hold the magazine properly and furrow your brow.

The answers are at the bottom of the page. The first quiz follows.

Which Decade Is It, Anyway?

The object of this game is to guess to which decade--the 1960s or the 1990s--each of the following statements applies:

Lifestyle in the '90s Bonus Quiz

This quiz consists of a series of statements, followed by three possible ways of completing the sentence. Your response will be at least as useful as watching daytime television in helping you understand life-events in the 1990s:

The bonus point is 1910s and 1940s, and probably other decades I was too lazy to check. With one exception, the answer to all of the questions is "both" in quiz 1 and "all three" in quiz 2. The exception is question 10 in the first quiz. The correct answer to it is "1960s." Television in the 1990s is a vaster wasteland.

Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins professor.


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