By Jennifer Bradley, Staff Writer
”Hunger Games” fans were put to the test at a Princeton Public Library “Hunger Games” trivia contest on Monday, July 23.
The contest featured a “Jeopardy style” board on a projector screen with five categories and questions that ranged in point value from one to five.
The participants were broken up into two teams to tackle the questions. One team was named Nightlock and the other was dubbed NNAVS, a combination of the first letters of the first names of the team members.
”There’s so much interest in the “Hunger Games” right now and it’s fun to do something for teens and older kids since a lot of the events we do are for younger kids,” said Beth Bouwman, the library representative running the game.
According to Ms. Bouwman, the “Hunger Games” books are hardly ever on the shelves of the library for long because people keep checking them out.
Ms. Bouwman said the library also held trivia contests for other popular book series such as “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson.”
The categories for the “Hunger Games” trivia game were All About the Everdeens, The Arena, District 12, The Capitol and Film Facts. Ms. Bouwman said all of the questions only focused on the first book in the trilogy in case the participants did not read the other books.
”I really like the books and when I saw that they were doing this I was like, wow!, I’ll probably be really good at this,” said Alesandro Walker, 13, a member of the NNAVS.
”I was just around and had nothing else to do so I decided to come to this,” said Noah Daniecki, 12, who was another participant. “The books were awesome. I felt very attached to them, and they weren’t boring at all.”
Once the game started, each team took turns choosing a category and point value. Both teams were then allowed to discuss and write their answer and were awarded points if they answered correctly.
The game went on until all questions were selected. After all the questions were answered, the players participated in a final round.
Both teams got the majority of the questions correct.
”Some questions were hard and some were easy,” said 12-year-old Nikita Khatri, a member of NNAVS who read all of the “Hunger Games” books and read the first two books twice. “Most of them were easy though.”
Nikita’s teammate and friend Sophie Stokman, 12, who came from Lawrenceville to participate in the contest, seemed to agree with Nikita about the difficulty of the questions.
”Most of the questions were easy,” Sophie said. “The hard ones were the ones you never paid attention to in the book because they were small details.”
The first question that stumped both teams was a five-point question in the Capitol category that asked for the name of the Capitol document that established the hunger games. The answer was the Treaty of Treason.
NNAVS first broke the tie between the teams with a correct answer to the question about where the Capitol was located.
Nightlock came back from behind when the team knew the “Hunger Games” movie was shot in North Carolina and NNAVS did not, but NNAVS took back the lead when they knew the correct number of tributes that died on the first day of the games.
After that, NNAVS maintained the lead and achieved a final score of 50 points while Nightlock had 42.
The teams then moved onto the final round. Nightlock wagered 41 points to try and catch up to NNAVS, and NNAVS only wagered eight points.
The question asked for the population of District 12, and the team closest to the actual number was awarded their wagered points.
Both teams guessed 1,500 people, but the actual population was 8,000 people. Since both teams’ guesses were not close to the actual population, they both lost their wagered points, which made the final scores 1 point for Nightlock, and 42 points for NNAVS.
NNAVS was very excited to win and its members were allowed to pick a prize from a variety of different library items such as T-shirts and books. Nightlock was then able to pick from what remained of the prizes, and all participants and spectators were offered “Hunger Games” bookmarks.
Ms. Bouwman said PPL does not have plans to hold another “Hunger Games” trivia contest for the second and third books and movies, but added that does not mean they will not look into it.

