Hello, Point-dexters!

I’m your Quizmaster, Aimee Lucido, and this is Bonus Points: the newsletter that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at last week’s Pointed news quiz. Want to be the first to know when a new quiz goes live? Sign up for email alerts here. Want to see this newsletter in your inbox every week? Sign up for the newsletter here.

One bit of business before we get going: This week’s quiz came with an unexpected bug. Many of you tried to play but were met with a completion screen as if you’d already played and scored 95 points. That was a mistake on our end, and hopefully you were able to re-take the quiz after we fixed the bug. And hopefully you scored better than 95! It seems like many of you did – the average this week was 104.5.

And if you didn’t do quite so well, it was probably one of the three prime minister questions that tripped you up. That’s because the first one was the…

Hardest Question of the Week

On Sept. 7, which prime minister announced he would resign? The announcement came after the PM’s Liberal Democratic Party suffered a historic upper house setback in July’s election. 

A) KP Sharma Oli
B) Shigeru Ishiba
C) François Bayrou
D) Anutin Charnvirakul

You fell right into our trap with this one. Probably the most-covered PM news of the week was France’s previous prime minister, François Bayrou, resigning. But that didn’t happen until Sept. 9. Also, there wasn’t an election in France in July, and the generically-named Liberal Democratic Party is actually the name of a long-ruling political party in Japan. Don’t feel too bad if you missed this one, though. Only 46% of people got the correct answer, which was Shigeru Ishiba. Almost as many people, 42% of you, went with the red herring François Bayrou. Tant pis!

Deleted Scenes

It was a biiiiiiig news week last week, so we needed to cut some questions I wanted to keep. Including this one:

A report released by a network of environmental organizations showed that the concentration of perfluorooctane sulfonic acid in fish far exceeds European Union limits in at least seven countries. Fluorinated compounds, sometimes called PFAS, are also known by what name? 

A) Clean coal 
B) Fossil fuels
C) Acid rain
D) Forever chemicals

First and foremost, “clean coal” isn’t really a specific compound. It’s more of a series of technologies that no one has been able to build to scale. And “clean coal” technologies still use coal, which, like fossil fuels in general, is mostly made of carbon. So the answer isn’t clean coal or fossil fuels. Acid rain isn’t any specific compound, it’s just rain (H2O) that is more acidic than usual, often due to the presence of either sulfuric acid or nitric acid. And even though PFAS do include sulfur, they also include fluorine, which acid rain does not. That leaves forever chemicals, which break down slowly. That’s a problem for European rivers and the fish that live in them.

Trivia From Outside the News Cycle

About seven years ago, during a very different time in my life, I bought a piano. It made sense at the time, but then my life circumstances changed and someone babysat it for two years. Finally, my piano has returned, and last week, I played it for the first time since before my daughter was born. I decided to start with something French, flubbing my way through a ton of one particular composer. I played Serenade for the Doll and Golliwog’s Cakewalk from Children’s Corner, but I didn’t play arguably his most popular piece, which is the third of four movements from Suite Bergamasque. Which composer did I play? 

Oh, and here’s the answer to last week’s Trivia From Outside the News Cycle question. The question was: “You can find an artful combination of the Younger Futhark runic symbols for the letters H and B somewhere on most modern cellphones. What does the combined symbol signify?” The answer is Bluetooth, which is named for the Viking king Harald Bluetooth, known for his role in the unification of Denmark and helping to Christianize Scandinavia. Another fun fact, actress and model Hedy Lamarr invented a technology known as “frequency hopping,” which is used in modern Bluetooth.

We’re already hard at work drafting this week’s Pointed, so if you’re looking for a hint to help you join that elusive 190 club, you’ve come to the right place. Your hint is to take a look at some classic Wagner musical dramas. It may help you with a question about basketball.

Have thoughts on the quiz? Reach out! pointed@bloomberg.net. 

Aimee Lucido

Aka The Quizmaster