Common link

Common link questions (or common links) are pyramidal tossups whose answer is a word or phrase that happens to be common to several distinct entities that are otherwise unrelated and not linked by a theme of any significance.

Common links are not to be confused with list tossups, an obsolete form of question that simply lists different things and expects the player to somehow deduce a common attribute without any clues.

Example

A 1998 work by Tracey Emin is entitled “My” one of these objects. One painting primarily set on one of these objects depicts a woman, a ghastly demon, and a horse emerging from a curtain, and was painted by Henry Fuseli. A large red one of these objects is found in Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, and the right side of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage also contains a red one of these objects. For 10 points, name this piece of furniture, on which the title figures of the paintings Olympia and Venus of Urbino recline.

ANSWER: beds

(from HSAPQ ACF-Format Set 1, Packet 3)

Assessment

Common link questions can add creativity to a question set and incorporate important clues that would be too difficult to serve as answer choices of their own.

Individual common link questions have been criticized for requiring the player to "read the writer's mind" or for having underspecific or overspecific answer lines. Despite this, some number of common link questions are de facto standard in "good quizbowl" sets.