By now you’ve hopefully been to a few league meets and have seen the types of questions that are asked. Beyond simply learning the material, you might also want to start learning section/chapter analysis and concordance. You will have to do the section analysis yourself, but the chapter analysis is contained in between the portion and concordance. It is very important to look at this first to determine what is considered an analysis item and what isn’t. In the portion text, individuals appear in bold, geographical locations appear in italics and Old Testament Scriptures are underlined. Compound individuals and geographical locations are also underlined. You will not have to worry about these in Corinthians as there are none. Occasionally, mistakes are made by those who typeset the portion or write the chapter analysis. The general rule of thumb is that in those cases, you go with what the book says. In extreme situations, corrections are issued, usually on the Bible Quiz websites. Two questions that often come up here are “Jesus” and “Israel”. In gospels, Jesus is considered an individual, however in epistles, Jesus is considered deity and is not bolded. He is also usually considered a deity in Acts. Whether he is in the first eleven verses of Acts or not is usually decided each time we quiz over Acts. With “Israel”, sometimes it refers to Jacob, sometimes it refers to the country and sometimes it refers to a race of people. Sometimes it actually refers to more than one of these. Another reason you should read the chapter analysis in the back is to learn what exactly is considered a question or exclamation. Again, there has never been a set rule for how we deal with colons in the text. Sometimes the words before the colon are included and sometimes they are not, so check the chapter analysis to be sure.
If you’ve been to a few tournaments, you’ve probably also heard “cross-reference” or concordance questions. These are questions where the answers come from non-consecutive verses, possibly from across the entire material. These are some of the hardest questions to answer and it takes an enormous amount of effort to memorize answers for them. We’ll discuss these in more detail in the section for advanced quizzers, but for now, when you review the material each week by quoting it, try to make parallels in your mind. For instance, you might have noticed that in 1 Cor 1, it speaks of the household of Chloe and also of the household of Stephanas. Make a special note of that as you might be asked to give those two verses, or even to answer whose households are mentioned. Once you notice something like this, you should always look the word up in the concordance. In this case, the household of Stephanas is also mentioned in 1 Cor 16:15. A writer could ask you to give the two verses which mention Stephanas’ household, or he could also ask to give all three verses, usually as a two-part reference quotation quotation. You should not limit your concordance search to the word “household”. Notice that just above the word “house” also appears. 1 Cor 16:19 speaks of the house of Aquila and Priscilla and 2 Cor 5:1 speaks of an eternal house (used to signify heaven). You could also look at the words “home” or “house”.