Pro, Con, Pro, Con Trivia Quiz

Answer: Promotion

An object in motion is an object that's moving. It could be traveling forward, backward, sideways, up, down, or in a circle, but whatever it's doing, it definitely isn't stopped. A promotion, meanwhile, raises an employee to a higher position in an organization, often with an increase in pay and authority. Alternatively, it could be a marketing or discount campaign designed to get people moving into a store. Either way, the person doing the promoting has definite views on the directionality of the exercise.

Answer: Constable

Horses are housed together in a stable, which is generally built with stalls, a hayloft, and all the other comforts these equines may require. A constable is a police officer. In the past, their work may often have taken them to stables for one reason or another, but nowadays they're infrequent visitors at best.

Answer: Provision

Literally, "vision" is a synonym for "eyesight," be it good or bad; figuratively, a visionary is one who sees things as they could be, not as they actually are. Provisions, meanwhile, are supplies - food, water, clothing, whatever makes sense for the activity being planned. Reading over the records of some failed expeditions, you might think that it takes a visionary to provision a team, but it actually just takes careful planning - which may well be significantly rarer.

Answer: Convent

Imagine a fluid or gas under high pressure - hot gases in a volcano, for example, or hot air in a clothes dryer. If there's an opening - a vent - the fluid will tend to escape. Vents can open themselves under pressure (as in the case of a volcano), or they can be added on purpose for safety or other considerations.

A convent - a community for women in religious life - is not generally considered a high-pressure situation, but nonetheless there have always been nuns who have needed to vent on occasion.

Answer: Probe

"To be" is to exist, to have some characteristic, to happen, to occur - it's one of the most indispensable words in the English language, and I've used a form of it twice just in the last sentence. To probe something is to examine it thoroughly, either physically or figuratively.

Here at last are two words that fit together beautifully: how better to understand something's state of existence than to probe it?

Answer: Converse

Poems and songs are often divided into verses, shorter components with well-defined structure. (In songs, the verses are often separated by a repeated chorus.) To converse, meanwhile, is to speak with another person or with other people - to have a conversation. This conversation could certainly be about poetry, but as a general rule it is conducted in prose.

Answer: Program

A gram, one one-thousandth of a kilogram, is a unit of mass in the metric system, small on the human scale. You might expect a program to be someone who is passionately in favor of metric measurements, but it's quite unrelated - instead, a program is a schedule of events or activities, for example at a radio station or a theatrical performance. Do you like the piece that just finished? Check the program and find out exactly what it was!

Answer: Contest

A test is a way of proving yourself. In schools, it provides an opportunity for students to show what they've learned; in life, you might encounter the dreaded test of character. A contest, by contrast, is a way of proving yourself against others, of identifying the best individual or team at a given task.

This could be as formalized as a game of sports, or as subtle and personal as a contest of wills. There are even academic contests that are settled by test scores!

Answer: Protractor

A tractor is a piece of heavy farm machinery with large wheels in the back and a powerful motor; it's frequently used to pull heavy objects over rough ground. The word can also refer to the motorized part of a heavy truck, which pulls a trailer full of goods behind it.

A protractor, on the other hand, is a measuring device used to determine the size of a geometric angle; it's very useful, but has zero horsepower.

Answer: Concrete

Crete, home of the ancient Minoan civilization, is a large island in the Mediterranean that attracts large numbers of archaeology buffs, hikers, and beach lovers every summer. Concrete is a rather rougher thing, a mix of cement, gravel, water and sand that hardens into a sturdy building material. If, at any time in the last fifty years, you've walked on a sidewalk or remarked to yourself that a modern building was particularly ugly, you've seen concrete in action.