Newspaper people are trivia experts by necessity, so it’s nice to be able to attend a competition of other trivia experts, which was what went on yesterday at Suffern High School.

Since 1976, the Rockland Academic League has held meets during the school year and then its Invitational on or about St. Patrick’s Day. Dave Silver, who helped start the League and has overseen most of it since then, called it March Madness for the not-necessarily-sports-minded kids who excel at school work.

Among the questions that stumped the high school teens during the rounds leading up to the finish were these: name the stars of the movie African Queen; Which book contained the phrase “the horror! the horror!” and who wrote it; the Bible says WHAT is the root of all evil; and what was Charles Dickens’s last book? All questions I knew the answer to.

(Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn,  Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” love of money, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

Of course, while (figuratively) patting myself on the back over knowing these bits of information, I also was in awe of the teens, who could answer the math questions without blinking an eye: a triangle has sides of length 4, 8 and 8. The shortest side of a similar triangle has length 6. Determine the perimeter of the larger triangle. (answer: 30) … the diagonals of a rhmobus are 16 and 30. Determine the length of a side. (answer: 17).

While interviewing the Nanuet team, I asked the students how their season had been going. They were seventh of 10 teams, up from last year, when they were pretty nearly last, one of the students said.

They had figured out that if there was a three-way tie during the Invitational, they had a shot at the final round.  The chances of actually making the final? I asked the math whiz on the team.
“That’s a specific probability equation, and we don’t get that until we’re in college,” he answered with a smile.