What a Load of Hyper! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Hyperbole

A hyperbole is a statement not meant to be taken literally, but is a deliberate exaggeration meant to emphasise or to create an effect. In 2011, Julia Gillard, the then Prime Minister of Australia, famously mispronounced hyperbole as "hyper-bowl". Are you sure you know the correct pronunciation?

Answer: Hypercorrection

Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put." While grammatically correct, the sentence is very clumsy, and was used by Churchill to illustrate the folly of hypercorrection. Hypercorrection is the attempt to avoid an error in the use of language that results in another error.

Other common examples are saying "you and I" instead of "you and me", and adding "-ly" after a word, such as in "majorly" or "thusly". According to "The Chicago Manual of Style" it is perfectly acceptable to use a preposition to end a sentence up with.

Answer: I have high blood pressure.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, can be a contributing factor in many diseases, such as heart attack, kidney failure and stroke. It often does not display any symptoms and goes undetected as a result. That it is why it is important to have regular health checks so that the condition can be detected and treated. A healthy life style is important. High blood pressure can be caused or worsened by poor life style choices including lack of exercise, a diet high in salt, and heavy drinking. (You can go back to your red wine now.)

Answer: Experience of past traumatic events

Hyperarousal is a major symptom of PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder, a common condition among veterans of military service. According to Joshua S. Goldstein in his 2001 book "War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa" - "The number of psychiatric casualties in every war in this century ... have exceeded the number of soldiers killed by hostile fire by 100 percent." In World War I, military leaders denied pensions to sufferers of "shell shock" as it was then called, denying that it was a real condition and was being used by troops as a device to facilitate an escape from the war front.

This condition is not limited to war veterans. Victims of other traumas such as violent crime, motor vehicle accidents, fire, etc, also often develop PTSD. Thankfully our understanding of this debilitating condition has increased in recent years and continues to do so.

Answer: Hyperkinetic

The term is used in medicine to describe a disorder characterised by such things as muscle spasms, hyperactivity and inability to concentrate. It is also deliberately used in many common activities, not limited to preachers. For example, it is often used to good effect in slapstick comedy, competition dancing, and performance art. Politicians and salesmen also frequently use it as a tool to engage and mesmerise their audiences.

But wait, there's more! The next question will amaze you! Do it now! It slices, it dices!

Answer: Prices are skyrocketing.

Hyperinflation is used in economics to describe a highly dramatic fall in the purchasing power of money, or in other words an equally dramatic rise in prices which could increase by 50% every month or even faster. It reached truly astonishing levels in Zimbabwe from 2006 to 2009.

The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion trillion) two dollar bills at the peak of hyperinflation, if they could have been printed, would have been needed to equal a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill in 1978.

The pile of bills would have stretched from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy. (Adapted from "Shadow Government Statistics", John Williams, Issue 50, 2009)

Answer: Hypermodernism

The hypermodern school in chess was developed in the 1920s and later by grandmasters who sought to re-invigorate a game that they felt had become dogmatic and boring, with radical new strategies for play. Prominent among these were the Indian Defences, featuring fianchettoing of bishops and attacking the opponent's pawn centre.

In art "... an underlying flexible self-identity often coupled with a strong irony of statement categorize the movement. Some theorists view hypermodernism as a form of resistance to standard modernism; others see it as late romanticism in modernist trappings." ("Omnics International"). Whew, such words! Is that an example of hyperrealistic grandiloquence or simply hyperbole?

Answer: An elementary particle from the baryon class

Hyperons belong to a class of elementary (or sub-atomic) particles called baryons, that also includes the proton and the neutron. There are several types of hyperon, all of which are heavier than protons and neutrons, and which have a nonzero strangeness number.

The name has generally been limited to particles which have long lifetimes relative to the mind-bogglingly short 100 yoctoseconds. Hyperon particles that are unstable (that is, with even shorter lifetimes) are commonly referred to as excited hyperons. What, I hear you ask, is a yoctosecond? It is one trillionth of one trillionth of a second and is roughly the time it takes light to cross an atomic nucleus. Now that's a hyper-short period of time!

Answer: I see distant objects far better than near ones.

In hyperopia the eyeball is too short front to back, or alternatively the optical components of the eye (lens and cornea) are not strong enough, meaning that images are focused behind the retina. The result is that vision is better for distant objects than for near objects.

The average person is slightly hyperopic, but this is not normally a problem because the lens compensates easily. Hyperopia is also called farsightedness, but this term can be misleading, because while hyperopic people generally can see better in the distance than close, they cannot see better at a distance than someone else who is not hyperopic. We all tend to find it harder to focus on close objects as we age. Hyperopes may need reading spectacles earlier because they have to focus more to start with.

Answer: People from a land in the far North, the winter home of Apollo.

Hyperborea was a mythical land located in the far north, believed to be beyond the home of the north wind. Its inhabitants people were long-lived and untouched by war, hard toil or the ravages of old age and disease. The land was bountiful, the countryside was wild and covered with beautiful forests, and white swans swam in its tree-lined river.

In legend it was the winter home of the god Apollo. Hyperboreans have also been hypothesised by historians to have lived in many other places including Northeast Asia and Britain.