Now......for the second group of questions:
5) Flip the tables: Name at least 3 reasons IN FAVOR OF overseeding (beyond pretty green grass aestheics).
6) What is ET, what is it composed of (5 things), and what is it used for on most golf courses?
7) Name 4 legitimate reasons why a fairway could be overly wet at 8:00am on a Tuesday that are NOT the result of poor maintenance practices.
How is striping achieved on a golf course and why can it be more difficult to achieve on your lawn at home?
9) Name at least 4 golf course features that a superintendent may be responsible for that have nothing to do with turfgrass (but still may consume a lot of their time and manpower!).
10) A valve-in-head automatic sprinkler on the golf course will not turn on when activitated remotely (with a radio, irrigation control box, or central control computer). What is the first (and easiest) thing to check for first in diagnosing the problem? [I'm actually curious to see how quickly this answer comes up......it may only be the easiest for me because I deal with it on a regular basis]
BONUS CADDYSHACK QUESTION: Name two differences between a mole and a gopher.
Good luck and enjoy!
And the answers to part 2.......
5) Cool season grass protects (cushions) dormant grass from heavy traffic; actively growing turf will fill in divots and ball marks where dormant turf may have alot of damaged areas/divots by the end of the winter; actively growing turf will take up moisture from rainfall which usually firms up the soil profile faster; if your course or part of your course is not 100% warm season, not overseeding will leave thin, bare and eventually muddy, messy areas that won't recover until spring; better playing surface (I don't necessarily agree that overseeded turf is a better playing surface than dormant turf, but it is a valid reason for many)
6) ET = Evapotranspiration, which is the water lost by the grass plant through the process of evaporation (from the soil and plant surfaces) and transpiration (water release by the plant as part of its respiratory process). It is caculated through a formula (too complicated to post) that takes into account temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind and rainfall. The majority of golf courses use this number as their prime source of information in determining how much to irrigate their golf course, though it should be noted that hardly anyone replaces 100% of ET (the water lost by the plant over the course of a day) and many crops have numbers called crop coefficients that are a percentage of the daily ET that needs to be replaced for that crop to remain healthy. Cool season grasses usually have a crop coefficient of around 0.7-0.9 (70-90% of ET needs to be replaced) and warm season is around 0.6-0.75 (or sometimes lower). If you want to be a water conservation superstar with your home lawn, do the following: find out what the percipitation rate is of your sprinklers (pretty easy to find out online or by asking at your local irrigation supply store....will be in inches per hour). Search the internet for weather station data in your area (CA users can use CIMIS, a great resource) or call your closest golf course superintendent to ask him where he gets his ET data from. Do some simple math and figure out how long you should set your sprinklers to run based on average daily ETs for different seasons of the year.
7) Irrigation break/leak, recent rainfall event, a fertilizer or pesticide application was just watered in as required by the product label, the superintendent scheduled a "leaching event" for the previous night's irrigation (leaching is a process of applying a large, more-than-necessary volume of water to flush the soil profile of harmful salts)
8. Striping is visible because grass blade have two different colored sides.....one side is a duller, lighter color and the other has a darker color with more of a sheen. The degree of visible difference between the two varies depending on the grass species. Stripes are created when mowers, especially those with heavy rollers following the cutting blades, lay the grass blades over in one direction mowing one way and the other direction mowing back. This is difficult to achieve in most home lawns because most home lawn mowers don't have any rollers.
9) Water features, cart paths, landscaping, clubhouse maintenance, trees, bunkers
10) First and absolutely easiest thing to do is make sure there is water to the sprinkler (i.e. that the valve to the lateral line the sprinkler is on is not closed and/or that the pump station is online and working properly) usually checked most easily by turning on another sprinkler on the same line or finding the valve box and checking to see if the gate valve is closed
BONUS: I can't say it any better than RJ Daley, so check out his answer a few posts back!