(Question)
Marnie Sleightholme was well chuffed when she got the chance to be carnival queen, and she couldn't give a shit if it was true what folk were saying about her only getting picked because she'd had her right arm ripped off. Ever since the accident, Deborah Bullock had been using twice as much make-up to disguise her rage. Marnie being picked as carnival queen had only made her pile it on even thicker. Deborah Bullock told anyone who would listen how it was a complete piss-take to give the job to a cripple. 'Imagine getting a wedding cake covered in frosty decorations and shit like that, but it's already got a big chunk bitten out of it. Well, that's exactly how it is.' Deborah Bullock had dreamed of being carnival queen since more or less the start of primary school. She used to tear their pictures out of the newspaper and dress up to look like them, and tell Marnie she never could because she was too fat and ugly even to pretend. It was Deborah Bullock's on-off boyfriend who'd been driving the car Marnie had been sitting in when it veered off the road and crashed into a tree halfway down Back South Lane. It was pointless trying to hide the truth. There was only one reason anybody went down Back South Lane at that time of night, and the flashing blue lights illuminated the exact location for the whole town to see. When Marnie came round in a hospital bed, the first face she saw was Deborah Bullock's. She felt an ache in her side and blinked her eyes. The room was bare and cold. There was an empty chair in the corner. Deborah Bullock slapped some cheap flowers down on the bed and leaned in. She smelled of talcum powder and nicotine. 'Do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is you've finally lost some weight. The bad news is, they've chopped your right arm off. So you're still a fat bitch.' Where does the carnival queen reign? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - At the circus carnival that leaves town tomorrow. - In Marnie and Deborah's community. - At the local cruise line headquarters. - not enough information
(Answer)
In Marnie and Deborah's community.


(Question)
I once went out to have fun with a friend of a different nationality, and she wanted to go to a place that featured the music of her culture. Since I have always been interested in other cultures, I was happy to go along. While we were sitting at a table together, an older man came up and asked to buy me a drink. I told him “no thank you, I do not drink”. My arm was laying on top of the booth because I was sitting sideways since my big old pregnant belly would not fit under the table. He reached over and took my hand and said “ Come dance with me then”. I again told him I was not interested in dancing. He began to squeeze my hand and insisting I get up and dance with him. I kept telling him no, and pointing to my belly and saying I would not be dancing with anyone. He just kept squeezing my hand harder and trying to pull me out of the booth. I got angry when I felt something break in my hand and screamed at him “Get your effing hands off me!” The bar owner came over to see what the problem was. I explained that “this jerk just hurt my hand because I would not drink or dance with him!” The owner looked at me crying, and the man laughing, and kicked my friend and I out of the place! Seems the rude SOB was his best friend. I got a bad taste for places of that culture (although I do love the cuisine) and a broken bone in my left hand for my trouble. She and I never went out again because she was so embarrassed about what the guy did to me, but she did take me to the ER on the way home. The rude man lingered around the booth at the bar probably for: Pick the correct answer from the following options: - 20 minutes - one hour - several minutes - not enough information
(Answer)
several minutes


(Question)
I picked up this Sporf in Amsterdam Schipol airport. A spork I'd seen before, but the addition of a simple serration on the side of the fork end makes this a genuine "three-in-one" implement for eating one's full three-course takeaway meal on the plane. The sporf is no innovation; back in 1940 the "sporf" was born. It took me until 2015 to notice this one thanks to its rather pleasant design. The sporf is a little like most strategy documents that I come across. It is one implement designed to serve a multitude of goals, but with one fatal flaw: you can only ever use one part of the sporf / strategy at any one time. With the sporf, things would get messy trying to use the spoon and knife and the same time. The knife and fork work quite well in sequence but physics prevents me using both at the same time as I can with the older technologies of knife and fork. In strategy formation, we can develop a multitude of potential purposes within one document, killer vision statement or mission. But it's important to recognise that the teams around us will only ever be able to do one thing really well at any one time. This is a lesson oft ignored by schools, in particular, as they attempt to ask educators to create an ever-more creative curriculum without having first tackled attitudes towards summative assessments throughout the year. It is also a challenge in some of the world's most successful, but now stagnating, big businesses: they've spent decades or centuries building a reputation across a large array of devices, technologies, components or clothing, but the real strategy is working out which of the current array needs killed off to enable teams in their quest to develop something totally new, properly innovative. When did the narrator notice the sporf? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - Before boarding their flight - When they got home - After leaving the airport - not enough information
(Answer)
