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Any Questions #201

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel take stock of their first 200 shows with No. 201.

Last week's challenge
Start with the name of last week's special guest Nate Corddry's podcast READING ALOUD. Change one letter to a B, and you can rearrange the result to spell a two-word phrase (seven letters, five letters) for something that would make it difficult to listen to a podcast. What is the phrase?
Answer: If you change the N to a B, you can spell GARBLED AUDIO.

THIS WEEK'S CATEGORY: THE DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE
On-air questions
: On July 3, 1884, Dow Jones and Company published its first stock average. Included in the "Customer's Afternoon Letter," the average contained nine railroads, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and Western Union. Today, it includes Delta Airlines, UPS, and 18 other companies, and is known as the Dow Jones Transportation Average. To commemorate the average's first publication, I've brought some questions about its more well-known relative: the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
1. In March of 2015, AT&T (which had been a part of the Dow index since 1999) was replaced by what multi-national company, which is currently the world's largest technology company by total assets, the world's second-largest information technology company, and the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer?
2. Speaking of Apple: it and three other companies — Cisco Systems, Intel, and Microsoft — are the only ones on the Dow Jones index that are not traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, they are traded on what exchange, commonly known by its six-letter acronym?
3. How Now, Dow Jones premiered on Broadway in 1967, and featured a score by award-winning composer Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein received two Tony award nominations for Best Original Score: one for How Now, Dow Jones and one for what 1983 musical, based on — and named for — a wizard from Arthurian legend?
4. The only company currently on the Dow index that was among the original twelve companies on the list is which conglomerate, formed by the merger of several companies in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including the Edison Lamp Company?
5. Which of these increases in the Dow Jones Industrial Average took the longest to happen: from 100 to 1,000, from 1,000 to 5,000, or from 5,000 to 10,000?

Extra credit
1. AT&T's replacement on the Dow Jones Industrial Average leaves four companies on the current list whose names contain an ampersand. Two of them are Merck & Co., Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. What are the other two companies, both named for two of their founders?
2. Three of the four largest one-day percentage drops (including the largest drop) of the Dow index occurred in what month of the year?

This week's challenge
Start with the phrase DOW JONES. Change one letter to a G and you can rearrange the result to spell a two-word phrase (four letters in each word) that could be used to describe an uptick in the stock market. What is the phrase?

ANSWERS
On-air questions

1. Apple
2. NASDAQ
3. Merlin
4. General Electric
5. 100 to 1000

Extra credit
1. Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble
2. October
 

A lifelong resident of the Capital Region, Ian joined WAMC in late 2008 and became news director in 2013. He began working on Morning Edition and has produced The Capitol Connection, Congressional Corner, and several other WAMC programs. Ian can also be heard as the host of the WAMC News Podcast and on The Roundtable and various newscasts. Ian holds a BA in English and journalism and an MA in English, both from the University at Albany, where he has taught journalism since 2013.
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