Imperial falter in University Challenge

Imperial College's University Challenge team sadly broke their winning streak on Monday in their second quarter-final match, losing against Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The final score was Emmanuel 275 – Imperial 160; a very sound defeat after three glorious previous performances. The team, Ciaran Healy, Simon Good, Gilead Amit, Ben Nicolson and Ed Brightman, as profiled in last week's felix, have a final chance to get into the semi-finals by playing a third quarter-final match, broadcast on 8th March. They must win against Girton College, Cambridge in order to stay in the competition.

The match started well with Imperial running ahead and maintaining their lead for the first ten minutes of the half-hour programme. Unfortunately a question about yoga masterfully snatched by Emmanuel Captain, Alex Guttenplan got the Cambridge team the lead and they ran with it, answering four out of the next five starter questions. When it seemed Imperial might never get back their form, the team suddenly powered forward again and grabbed three starters in a row. At twenty one minutes, now lagging by only twenty points, anything still looked possible. Unfortunately it wasn't to be and the rest of the quiz was dominated by the other team who scored 120 points in just six and a half minutes. During that time, Imperial managed to get just one starter question: Healy redeemed himself after a mistake on the quantity 'h' in the Schrödinger equation with his quick recognition of the capital city of Kazakhstan.

This programme had the second highest combined score this series; the top three highest scoring matches have all been won by the Emmanuel team which consists of two students of medicine, one of French and Latin and one of Natural Sciences. Of the game, Imperial's team captain said “They were a really excellent team and impressively fast. It was a great match.”