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How much do the Crammers have to study?

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MSTieScott:
I've often wondered just how much material the contestants on \"Cram\" are given to memorize in their 24 hours of captivity. Recently, I realized that \"Biggest Riddle Book in the World,\" used on some episodes, is the same book that I had stored away in my bedroom from when I was younger. Since the contestants know they're going to be tested on riddles from the one book, I thought looking up the material used on an episode would be fairly representative of the overall amount of material given to them for studying, right?

So I found the page numbers and chapters of all of the riddles used in the April Fools' Day episode (since that was the only one I had on tape). Here's what I found:


Where do fish keep their money? (page 107, chapter 8)
In river banks.

What is a dog catcher? (page 101, chapter 8)
A Spot remover.

What happens to a postman when he gets old? (page 159, chapter 12)
He loses his zip.

How is a judge like an English teacher? (page 157, chapter 12)
They both hand out long sentences.

Why couldn't anyone play cards on the ark? (page 127, chapter 10)
Because Noah sat on the deck.

How does a pair of pants feel when it is ironed? (page 102, chapter 8)
Depressed.

Why do we dress baby girls in pink and baby boys in blue? (page 99, chapter 8)
Because they can't dress themselves.

What do they do with a tree after they chop it down? (page 118, chapter 9)
Chop it up.

Why did the comedian tell jokes to the eggs? (page 136, chapter 10)
He wanted to crack them up.

What \"bus\" crossed the ocean? (page 113, chapter 9)
Columbus.

What is the best way to make pants last? (page 109, chapter 8)
Make the jacket first.


Those are my results; make of them what you will. By the way, if you want the answers, just highlight the line underneath each question, where I have typed the answer in a color of text that hopefully approximates the background color here.

(One final note: Going into one of the commercial breaks, they showed one of the teams in their study room reading riddles to pedestrians. The riddle read by the contestant in that segment is found on page 35 of the book, way back in chapter 3. Which means that the contestants either had to memorize a lot more than was covered by the game material, or that that contestant was just picking random pages out of the book.)


--
Scott Robinson

Matt Ottinger:
The players tend to do such a good job coming up with correct responses that they're probably not asked to study much more than what we see on television.  In other words, it's not as if they're given the whole of human knowledge to work with, and then are surprised that they have to name Tom Cruise movies.

The rote memorization is probably the easiest part.  It's the staying up for 24 hours and then playing on a TV game show that's the tricky part.

beatlefreak84:
From what I've seen on the show, my guess is they are only given the books/articles that they will be quizzed on.  I'm not sure if they are told exact chapters or not, but there is no way that they have to memorize an entire book full of facts]

If I had to guess:  I'm willing to bet that they highlight specific chapters in the books (or lists in \"Cram's Big Dumb Book of Stupid Lists\") that they will be quizzed on, and maybe a few extra in order to make sure that the contestants stay on their toes.

However, I'm willing to agree with Matt on this one:  It's not the amount of material that they have to memorize, it's the staying-up part and then recalling all of that while deprived with sleep.  As a school student, I've bombed tests which required only about 2 note pages of memorization because I was sleep-deprived, so I don't think that \"Cram\" contestants have all that much to memorize!

However, this is just an opinion; can anyone set the record straight for all of us?

Anthony

cyberjoek:
Someone from GSN posted at one point that several episodes tape back to back and they all get the study material for several episodes.  There was one joke book for all the eps taping at once but different articals for each one.
That's what a GSN staffer posted on the gsn.com boards, I make no claims to how valid it is.
-Joe Kavanagh

Chelsea Thrasher:
[quote name=\'cyberjoek\' date=\'Jun 19 2003, 03:06 AM\'] Someone from GSN posted at one point that several episodes tape back to back and they all get the study material for several episodes.  There was one joke book for all the eps taping at once but different articals for each one.
That's what a GSN staffer posted on the gsn.com boards, I make no claims to how valid it is.
-Joe Kavanagh [/quote]
 From what I've been hearing/seeing, it appears season 2 contestants are kept up for *36* hours, instead of 27 (Season 1 Contestants were actually kept up 27 hours)

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