Brain Bowl Questions
The questions used in the Optimist Brain Bowl competition are general knowledge questions. They cover subjects being taught in school along with community awareness and current events.
This team is listening to the questionand is ready to buzz-in.
Some good places to start in regards to finding relevant questions for practice are 9th grade textbooks. These generally cover all the basics of their subjects and introduce more in-depth concepts. Brain Bowl tournaments include some general music, arts and physical education questions as well.
Tournament math questions cover all the areas to which students have been exposed so far such as sets, fractions, equations, percentages, shapes, etc. Math questions are usually presented in story form and can be answered in 15 seconds or less. Students are given pencils at the beginning of the day and scratch paper is provided at each site before the rounds begin.
Examples of community awareness type subjects include text messaging, home computer use and traffic/pedestrian safety laws. These kinds of subjects aren't typically included in middle school curriculum. Everyone is affected by the knowledge learned through the community so these types of questions are appropriate for Brain Bowl.
Current events are recent happenings that have made headlines across a wide spectrum of media and audiences. This could include current issues, events and people in the news locally, nationally and globally. Examples of these could include everything from healthcare reform to Balloon Boy. However, supermarket tabloid trivia is not considered for Brain Bowl questions.
Most Brain Bowl questions are easy-moderate in difficulty with some challenging questions. Since the questions are designed to be answerable, the key to Brain Bowl tournament success is tournament play and strategy. Teams may opt to buy questions from greatauk.com or a similar company but there are also some good resources online for free if you are willing to dig for them. General knowledge trivia games are also a good source of questions.