ISSUE 18 ARCHIVE - QUIZ: ARE YOU A SMART ^TM* DIVER?

Rob Hunt

Or are you some sort of buffoon? Quiz on to discover the truth.

Q1) You’re doing your Advanced Open Water course and your instructor has brought a bag of crisps down on the deep dive to demonstrate the effects of pressure at depth. Now it’s the safety stop and you want to eat the crisps. Bearing in mind that you need to impress your instructor in order to sex them later, how do you consume the delicious, potato-based delights without them getting wet?

A) Open the bag upside down so that the air pressure keeps the water out, adding exhaled bubbles if necessary, then stick your entire head inside the bag and eat the crisps.

B) Just put the whole unopened bag inside your mouth, chew and swallow at will.

Q2) A casual dive acquaintance ruminates aloud on the practicality of diving on the Titanic. Bearing in mind that you need to impress in order to stand a chance of sexing them later, what tops your list of planning considerations for such an effort?

A) The need for an exorcist and sufficient quantities of crucifixes to ward off disgruntled spirits of the dead.

B) Mask and fins.

Q3) Inspired by a television advertisement feature, your dive buddy fancies themself to be Batman and climbs some scaffolding in full Scuba gear in order to retrieve some balloons for the valuable helium inside. Your buddy falls off and goes splat, so you need to save their life in order to sex them later. What would a SMART^TM diver’s first-aid response begin with?

A) An investigation into why the victim believes Batman to wear Scuba.

B) Assessing whether first-aid is possible by ensuring the surrounding area is free of dangers such as exhaled tobacco smoke and a depleted ozone layer.

Q4) You’re back on the Advanced Open Water course, and the instructor asks if you’d like to stay on an extra day and complete an Enriched Air Nitrox Specialty course which will involve some math. You already sexed them last night, but have a generous soul and are willing to give it another go, if only for the sake of charity. How do you respond?

A) Point out that if you speak British English, Australian English, or any other kind of English that isn’t American English, then the word speciality has two ‘i’s in it and has five, not three, syllables. And it’s maths with an ‘s’ because mathematics is a plural. Call the police.

B) Point out that if you speak British English, Australian English, or any other kind of English that isn’t American English, then it’s maths with an ‘s’ because mathematics is a plural. And the word speciality has two ‘i’s in it and has five, not three, syllables. Call the police.

Q5) Midway through a liveaboard you have one of your unfortunate relapses. You come-to three weeks later, dressed as what you can only assume is supposed to be a pirate holidaying with Special Forces in Afghanistan in drag, and lightly-coated with your favourite jam. The liveaboard is two nautical miles adrift of a subtropical island, with a conspicuous lack of crew and guests, sexed or otherwise, and fuel. And food. And booze, obviously. And roof. What’s the island?

A) Using the angle of the sun at midday and the vessel’s compass to determine latitude and hemisphere, plus the distribution and type of island flora and fauna to deduce possible longitude, you are able to concur with the boat’s GPS that you’re somewhere foreign that you’ve never heard of.

B) Rapa Nui. It always is, for some reason. Maybe it’s something to do with the heads.

Q6) You’re setting a regular quiz for a dive magazine, but have been warned to stay within a strict word limit as previous efforts have been tedious, repetitive, unnecessarily long-winded, repetitive and tedious. What will you do to keep this one short enough to allow yourself time to sex yourself later?

A) Keep it to a completely arbitrary limit of six questions, purely to stay within the literary budget.

B) Take option A) and complain a bit to the editor despite being secretly pleased at the limit given that you’d pretty much run out of ideas by question 3** anyway.

How Did You Do?

Score one point for every answer A) and one point for every answer B).

Six points or less: I am embarrassed, not only for you, but because of you and because of what it means for someone with your obvious lack of mental acuity to represent an example of Homo sapiens.

Seven points or more: A promising start but needs to try harder. A fail, basically, but a pat on the head.

*SMART^TM is an acronym for Smart Mentally good brainially Agile Rememberally gifted and smarT.

**Of issue 6.