2. C - Virginia Tech currently offers 60 bachelor's degree programs and 140 master's and doctoral degree programs.

3. D - Homer Hickam (industrial and systems engineering '64) has written several best-selling novels, including the other three mentioned as possible answers, but Rocket Boys was the basis for "October Sky."

4. B - Virginia Tech has produced two Rhodes Scholars. William W. Lewis Jr. (physics '63) was the first. Lewis, who earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1966, has held positions with the Department of Defense, Princeton University, the University of California, the World Bank, and the Department of Energy. Mark Embree (mathematics and computer science '96) became Virginia Tech's second Rhodes Scholar in 1996. Currently, Embree is associate professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

5. A - The first company formed from a Virginia Tech intellectual property was VTLS Inc., founded by Vinod Chachra to create copyrighted software for libraries worldwide. Of the other choices listed, TransPharm was formed to produce human protein C in the milk of transgenic livestock. It merged with PPL of Scotland in 1994; as a result, VTIP owns a portion of the company that cloned Dolly the sheep. Microcel is a microbubble-based process and technology that removes waste, such as sulfur and ash, from super-fine coal particles and other minerals that was developed by Roe-Hoan Yoon and colleagues in the Virginia Center for Coal and Mineral Processing at Virginia Tech. The product was licensed to Kaiser Inc. and is manufactured worldwide. Eaton Corp. of Cleveland, Ohio, licenses a proximity sensor developed by former graduate student Kofi-D. Anim-Appiah (electrical engineering '89; M.S. '91), who went to work for Eaton; electrical engineering faculty member Sedki Riad; and former faculty member Shinzo Onishi. The sensors, which were patented in 1994, are used in automated industrial applications and are an essential part of robotics.

6. A - Add Caldwell (agriculture 1876) and his older brother, Milton M. "Mic" Caldwell, walked an estimated 26 miles to Blacksburg from their home in Sinking Creek, Craig County. Add registered sometime during the day of Oct. 1, 1872, the first day Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College opened its doors to enroll students. Mic enrolled several weeks later. By mid-November, only 60 students had registered, but enrollment that first year ultimately reached 132.

7. C - Virginia Tech has had four monikers during its 136-year history: Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and today's Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, popularly known as Virginia Tech.

8. A - For the Class of 2010, the state producing the most out-of-state students is Maryland, at 386 students. Rounding out the top five are New Jersey, with 190; Pennsylvania, with 188; North Carolina, with 101; and New York, with 74.

9. D - The supercomputer's name is System X, pronounced "System Ten," which originates from the team's goal of reaching 10 teraflops on the high performance LINPACK benchmark. Today, System X runs at 12.25 teraflops. When it was last ranked in November 2006, it was No. 47 on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers and remained the most powerful system categorized by TOP500 as "self-made" at any university.

10. B - The football teams first wore black and gray uniforms, a combination that caused some players to complain that their suits looked more like prison uniforms.

11. C - Counting the first president's home, which was constructed to house the first president and his family, Virginia Tech has used three official homes to house its presidents. The first one is the oldest section of Henderson Hall, which housed presidents from 1876 to 1902, beginning with Charles L.C. Minor. The second one is The Grove, first used by President John M. McBryde. During student unrest in the early 1970s, President T. Marshall Hahn Jr. constructed a private residence on Rainbow Ridge in Blacksburg and moved off campus. When he left to work for Georgia Pacific, the Georgia-Pacific Foundation donated the house to the Virginia Tech Foundation, and Hahn's successor, William E. Lavery, lived there during his tenure. At the end of Lavery's term, The Grove was remodeled and, beginning with President James D. McComas, has been used by all presidents since.

12. D - Hokie Stone was called "our native stone" when first used in campus building construction back in 1901.

13. A - Sally Miles, who served as athletic director from 1921 to 1935, helped found the Southern Conference in 1921.

14. C - Three alumni have traveled into space. Roger K. Crouch (M.S. physics '68; Ph.D. '71) twice served as the scientific astronaut with the Columbia space shuttle in 1997. Now he is the lead scientist for the NASA office that selects and funds the scientific experiments on the shuttles and on the International Space Station. Charlie Camarda (Ph.D. aerospace engineering '90) flew on the space shuttle Discovery in July 2005, the first flight to be launched after the Columbia disaster. And John B. "Jack" McKay (aerospace engineering '46) was one of the first seven pilots selected to fly the X-15 for NASA. He achieved astronaut status for taking it to an altitude of 56 miles and a speed of 398 mph.

15. D - In 1920, the university created the School of Engineering. In 1955, that school was changed to the School of Engineering and Architecture. In 1964, today's College of Engineering was established.

16. B - Last year, VictorTango, a team comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and a Virginia Tech autonomous systems spin-off company, Torc Technologies, won $500,000 when it placed third in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles.

17. A - Contrary to popular lore--and despite the many efforts of this publication to refute the myth--the Drillfield is not sinking at all. Spread the word....

18. B - In 1953, Irving L. Peddrew III became the first African-American student to enroll at the university. Peddrew was not the first African-American graduate, however. That distinction belongs to Charlie L. Yates (mechanical engineering '58).

19. C - Today, Virginia Tech serves 29,000+ full-time students both on and off the Blacksburg campus.

20. B - The filled fullerenes, or metallofullerenes, that are now being developed as improved MRI reagents and non-medical applications are commonly known as buckyballs.

21. A - Charles Landon Carter Minor served as president of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College from 1872-79.

22. C - Five women first enrolled as full-time students in 1921: Mary E. Brumfield (biology '23; M.S. '25), Billie Kent Kabrich, Lucy Lee Lancaster (biology '25), Carrie T. Sibold (biology '25), and Ruth Terrett Earle (civil engineering '25). Black women did not enroll until 1966; the first to break that boundary were Linda Adams Hoyle (statistics '68), Jacquelyn Butler Blackwell (sociology '70), Linda Edmonds Turner (clothing, textiles, and related arts '70; M.B.A. '76; Ph.D. business '79), Freddie Hairston, Marguerite Harper Scott (history '70), and Chiquita Hudson.

23. D - Robert C. Richardson (physics '58; M.S. '60) won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering how helium-3 can transform itself into a liquid that flows without friction at temperatures near absolute zero.

24. B - Virginia Tech is home to 21 intercollegiate athletic teams.

25. D - Hokie Stone was first used for the 1905 Chapel, which later became the library and has since been razed. The building design for the Chapel called for brick, but Hokie Stone was used at the last minute because of a brick shortage. The first McBryde was the first neo-Gothic building designed from the beginning to incorporate Hokie Stone.

26. A - Last year, a study led by the Design Futures Council and the journal DesignIntelligence ranked Virginia Tech's undergraduate architecture program as the best in the nation. Additionally, the study ranked the College of Architecture and Urban Studies' graduate program as fifth in the nation and first among all public universities.

27. D - Four alumni have served as president: Julian Ashby Burruss (civil engineering 1898), John Redd Hutcheson (agriculture '07; M.D. '09), Walter Stephenson Newman (M.S. agricultural education '19), and Charles William Steger (architecture '70; M.A. '71; Ph.D. environmental science and engineering '78).

28. B - Virginia Tech is one of only three public universities in the United States to support both a military and a non-military student lifestyle. The other two are Texas A&M and North Georgia College and State University.

29. C - There are currently eight colleges at Virginia Tech.

30. The eight colleges are as follows: College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, College of Engineering, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, College of Natural Resources, Pamplin College of Business, College of Science, and the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.