Read the following sentence using the voice of Alex Trebek, OK?

"This pastime has been popular in the United States for at least 50 years, with peaks in the 1950s, the 1980s, and again in the year 2000."

Answer: What is trivia?

And now, do your best Regis Philbin voice.

(Dramatic pause) "Is that your final answer?"

If this makes any sense to you at all, chances are you're one of the millions of people hooked on trivia games. The pursuit of trivia, it's fair to say, is one of the few hobbies that has stayed popular for decades.

Starting in the 1950s, when--according to Fifties Web--there were 22 game shows on TV at once (and that was a lot in those days), we've loved trivia challenges. We loved them so much, in fact, that contestants and producers sometimes cheated just to make them more entertaining.

You could say the $64,000 question is "What makes trivia so compelling?"

I have a few theories about it. Trivia is like the potato chip of knowledge: bite-sized and tasty. Once you get started, it's hard to stop consuming it. I just swallowed these nuggets myself:

• A fathom is equal to six feet and is usually used to describe the depth of a body of water.
• The coypu (also known as a nutria) looks like a rat but is the size of a beaver. It's often called "the beaver rat."
• A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. A 9-year-old boy named Milton invented it.
• One hundred cups of coffee over four hours can kill the average human (10 grams of caffeine, in case you were wondering the lethal dose).

Mastering trivia is a quick way of flashing your brain in front of your friends, and it's less likely to wrinkle than your college diploma. It can also be a useful pursuit, especially if you're surrounded by curious children. And of course, there's that million dollars you might win from Regis.

I wanted this column to be more than trivial, so I talked to an actual expert on the topic, Robert Thompson. He's a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University and president of the International Popular Culture Association. In other words, he's the guy you want as your lifeline if you're ever on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Thompson says education is one reason we've had a love affair with trivia since the 1950s. Lots of people have bachelor's degrees and have studied art, history, and philosophy, but they don't get a chance to show off that knowledge in their day jobs. The number of Americans who have completed four or more years of college grew from about 5 million in 1950 to nearly 45 million in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. Games such as Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy! provide an outlet for this knowledge. Same goes for Millionaire.

(This wasn't so much the case with the really popular 1950s game shows, Thompson says. Back then, watching the TV quiz shows was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. The players were doing things ordinary people couldn't do--answering incredibly hard questions, such as naming two aliases for seven different Sherlock Holmes characters.)

In the end, though, the $64,000 question isn't as interesting as the $1 million question, which is "How does one get good at answering the questions?"

The best way, Thompson says, is to get a great education. "Read a ton of books. The trivia will come," he says. "A really educated person becomes good at trivia almost by definition." (And it doesn't hurt that your life is richer and more interesting, he adds.)

Let's say you can't go to school right now, though. Your best bet is to cozy up to a great encyclopedia, such as Encarta. Rather than sitting down and starting with the letter A, though, you can take some shortcuts.

My brainiac friend Jules, who plays trivia games every week, swears that Encarta's On This Day page is the key to success. He reads it every day. And here's a hint: You can get to it by clicking the date in the upper right-hand corner of the MSN home page.

Encarta also has sections devoted to all the key knowledge areas.

By clicking on any of the links below, you will find articles and Web sites that are full of not only trivia, but also the rest of the information that makes a subject worth pursuing in-depth.

For example, in the Sports, Hobbies, and Pets section, you'll find a link to an article about Ted Williams. The trivia nugget there is that his nickname was The Splendid Splinter. What is important--and worth knowing--is the role he played in the sport of baseball.

Here are Encarta's categories:

• Physical Science & Technology
• Life Science
• Geography (or just go straight to the Atlas)
• History
• Social Science
• Religion & Philosophy
• Art, Language, & Literature
• Performing Arts
• Sports, Hobbies, & Pets

Within these knowledge areas, my favorite feature is the "challenge game," which appears right below the articles. There are 18 questions per game, and there's nothing that will make you feel smart like getting them all correct.

And, I'd add one more important area for trivia: current events. You won't find a better news site than MSNBC.

Of course, it's one thing to study all these great areas of knowledge; it's another thing trying to remember it all. You can be smart about it, though. Encarta will always be there to refer back to for the important stuff, so you can pick and choose what you commit to memory at any given time.

If you're really serious about being a trivia master, you'll have to focus hard on news and pop culture. Know what's current, and know your classics--who won which Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Nobel Prize and what are the names of famous athletes.

Then, get ready to work out your memory muscle. Some studies have shown that adults can generally keep seven items in their working memory at a time. But if you can compress and categorize information, you can carry more around with you. And if you really know something cold, you won't even have to carry it.

For example, you probably know a bunch of seven-digit phone numbers. If you had to remember each digit as a separate memory item, you'd basically be able to recall one phone number. But digits are stored in your head as one category of information. And you know them well enough that the number that comes after 6 is automatic. This means it doesn't take up space in your working memory, which leaves room for less-familiar concepts and facts.

To store those less-familiar facts, you can benefit from memory aids and mnemonic devices, which are named for Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. (Trivia factoid: She's the mother of all the muses.)

Here are three good memory helpers from the School Improvement in Maryland Web site:

• Rhymes: For example, remember that poem "Thirty days hath September"? This one helps a lot of people remember how many days are in each month.
• Acronyms: HOMES, for instance, is a good way to remember the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. (Prime trivia here: The surface area of the lakes covers about 94,250 square miles.)
• Linking: This is when you connect strange and unrelated things so that they stand out in your memory. Let's say you need to remember that the capital of Maryland is Annapolis. Think of a pair of married apples. Married reminds you of Maryland, and those romantic fruits remind you of Annapolis.

And when memory fails you, you can always take an educated guess. Are there clues in the question? Can you eliminate anything outright? Do you have a smart hunch?

When I played a practice game of Millionaire online, for example, I didn't know the answers to a few questions. While I knew for $100 that Santa lives at the North Pole (Wuhoo!), I wasn't sure what synesthesia meant. But I knew the definitions of some other words in the question, and by process of elimination, I was able to correctly guess that synesthesia was a "purple smell."

But even in my humble practice game, I failed to win an imaginary million dollars, which means I will not be buying an imaginary yacht. But what it really means is that I have a lot more to learn.

And you know what? I'm looking forward to it.