Swarthmore a few years ago had a rule against mentioning flags in questions which I never liked. I'll bring this subject up since it seems to cut to how I feel about it. If you are interested in current events, you had better know your way around geography, world capitals, and flags. All of this information can be found in an almanac, just like lists of Shakespeare's plays and chemical elements. This doesn't mean that they're not worth asking - the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's flag was and is darn important in that country's relations with Greece, and switching of flags (such as Cambodia did in the early 90s) can be quite significant. The old South African flag's main colors of orange and blue were transferred to a multicolored one to partially represent the leadership transition from the Dutch-descended Boers to a 'one person one vote' system. Airport codes can also reference interesting facts. Even certain highways have their own trivia associated with them. I have problems with someone who writes an airport code question just because they need a geography or a miscellaneous code to fill up a packet. But placing one of these questions every so often adds a little variety and queries a different set of information that some people find interesting. If not, eliminate "name the element" and "put these battles in correct order" bonuses, too. As someone who can do a little more than hold his own on geography, I'm not opposed to questions that you can get my memorizing a few almanac pages and I've actually written some myself - not every question in your specialty has to require that someone took twelve courses on the subject. In short - just because you can memorize it doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad.
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