I would be surprised if a nice list of such Pavlovs exists. From my experience watching the show, Jeopardy! asks an enormous number of questions about the presidents (indeed, I would anecdotally say it's the #1 category you should know), and while there are certainly some associations you could make (i.e. bachelor president = Buchanan), I think this is a case where having some depth of knowledge will prove really useful. Like, at a minimum, you should know their names in order, the years they served and what party they belonged to. Other things that are sometimes asked, or that are useful to know, roughly in decreasing order of importance: vice presidents, what political positions they held before they became president, names of spouses, state they're from, middle name, names of children. You should also know major things that happened when they're in office, plus, like, a ton of other stuff.DDG wrote:What I would find most useful, and I think I may be speaking on behalf of a few of my Canadian compatriots when I ask, is whether anyone knows of a reliable Pavlov list or other resource for Americana / American presidents / American history / American literature / etc?
I think having a deeper understanding of presidents also helps solidify my knowledge of events in American history. For example, when I decided to memorize the order of the presidents a few months ago, I didn't just go off a list; rather, I perused the Wikipedia article of each one. Now I can kind of work forward by thinking about the major events that were happening in American history at the time. This makes me slower, yes, but it also means I'm less likely to forget. Depends on your learning style, I suppose.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure a list of such Pavlovs would actually be useful; while some definitely exist (i.e. president who served on supreme court), such a list would only cover a small fraction of the amount of information you need on this particular topic, so your time is probably better spent learning about the subject as a whole. I find that this also makes studying easier to justify to myself, because I can convince myself I'm actually learning important things, rather than memorizing useless associations for a game show. In contrast, for example, I think that patent/inventor list I gave earlier covers like, 90% of what you'll need to know on that topic, so there you're probably best off just memorizing the Pavlovs. But maybe you're still interested anyway? And maybe your study methods differ from mine.
From skimming j-archive, it doesn't look like there's as ton of coherence to the bible questions. I mean sure, there's some -- Moses = Exodus; people cast into flames = Daniel; Solmon = wise; pity sayings = Proverbs, etc. etc. -- but there's a lot of odds and ends, and I'm guessing this is another category where it might be useful to have a general understanding of the major events.DDG wrote:I would add one more subject to that desired Pavlovs list: The Bible. I am consistently stumped on what I am sure are relatively straightforward Bible questions, and I'm not sure of a useful resource with which to study the subject "broad and narrow" for Jeopardy! and general knowledge purposes...
Thoughts?
That's how I actually talk.
