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This question came up on a pub quiz last night. The answer was parabola.

I disagreed, because I thought I remembered that angles could go off into infinity too. An angle is two rays whose endpoints are shared, so would that also count as a "bend" ? Or is there another name for this type of angle?

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    To add to Qiaochu's comment, even a hyperbola is a better answer for two reasons: (a) among conic sections, there are more hyperbolas than parabolas (in the sense that a parabola can be taken as a degenerate limit of a family of hyperbolas) (b) related to the first part is the consideration of the orbit of an object flying in from far away (infinity), approaching the solar system, and flying away again. For such an object it is generally more likely the orbit is [hyperbolic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_trajectory) than parabolic.2011-02-02

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This is the second worst pub quiz question that I have come across. There are so many "curves with single bends that go to infinity" that the question is meaningless.

BTW, the worst question was this: "Which continent is wider in the South than in the North?" You might like to ponder that for a microsecond.

The official answer from the book was, if you can believe it, Antarctica. I was flabbergasted (and said so). Some years later, I stumbled upon the key to this idiocy, quite by accident, while browsing my Encyclopaedia Britannica (as you do). An article on the continents said, quite reasonably (I am paraphrasing here): "With the exception of Antarctica, all continents are wider in the North than in the South." The question setter obviously read this exact same sentence and thought that a question could be forged out of it.

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    Good to know that there are lousy pub quizmasters the world over! :)2011-02-03