Two questions about University Challenge

[iwouldgoouttonight]

I'm probably being dim but why are some people 'studying' a subject and some people are 'reading' it. It doesn't seem to be linked to the subject, some say they study history and some read history.

And my second question is more of a musing, I wonder why there tend to be more male contestants than female. There is a team with three women on it tonight and that is unusual.

There were a couple of programmes before the current series showing the process of picking the teams to go into the series and the preparation that some of them do. There seemed to be a degree of swotting up facts, but quite a lot of it was practice on the format of the show itself - presumably in the hope that they won't freeze on The Day. There's a degree of technique to it, especially given the importance of winning on the starter questions- e.g if you think you know the answer but it's on the tip of your tongue, buzz anyway and hope that the answer will have fought its way to the forefront of your memory by the time they've finished saying your name.

I was on it. We didn't do any practice. Perhaps that's why we didn't win.

I wish they would do the non university version again...I am sure they did professions once

and I'd love to on in a team of MOTHERS...university of because i bloody said so.

and mostly the answers to algebra/maths/trig questions are 1 or 0, pi or cosine. imo

:o

I heard somewhere that you say "read" for the arts (English, humanities, politics, MFL etc) and study for maths and the sciences - the idea being that the sphere of academia for English, etc. consists of texts and abstract ideas that you read and ruminate over, whereas the sciences are more along the lines of theorems, experiments, axioms, concrete proofs etc that can be studied, re-tested, analysed etc.

Not that a text can't be analysed. Or an axiom can't be ruminated over. Oh dear, I'm not sure now.