Pageant Result: Miss Grand International 2025

The winners of Miss Grand International 2025 from left to right: Faith Maria Porter - Ghana - Third Runner Up, Sarunrat Puagpipat - Thailand - First Runner Up, Emma Tiglao - Philippines - Miss Grand International 2025- Winner, Aitana Carolina Jimenez - Spain - Second Runner Up, and Nariman Vattikha - Venezuela - Fourth Runner Up.  The pageant was held at MGI Hall in Bangkok, Thailand, last October 18, 2021.

A Question Needing An Answer

In Batobato Pick at It's Showtime ... host Jong Hilario posed the P450,000.00 question to the contestant ... "Sa kasalukuyang mga pangalan ng mga bansa ... bukod sa Zimbabwe ... ano pa ang nagsimula sa letter Z.

Halos mapatid and litid ko sa kasisigaw ng ZAIRE ... na ikinagulat naman nina Fred, David, Katong and Bonjo. I know it for a fact that Zaire is a country, and there was no doubt in my mind na mali ako.

In the last final jackpot questions in the same segment in the previous week, I have a 100 percent batting average, and I can't afford to miss this one ... so much so that there are four Doubting Thomases in my company who looked at me doubtfully and unconvinced ... I have to prove them wrong.

And now the 64 dollar question ... what happen kung ako ang candidate doon ... will they consider my answer ... dahil kung sasabihin nila na mali ang sagot ko ... magrereklamo ako talaga kung hindi nila ibigay sa akin ang almost half a million pesos. (Kaso eh hindi pala ako yon .... hehehe.)

Well, it turned out that the only answer they will accept is Zambia. Which is a "mood downer". I felt like my balloon popped. My answer is correct and I am sure I am right ... so where did my answer go wrong?

I tried to examine how the question was formed ... and then I checked the CONTEXT and scrutinized the words one by one. 

To the uninformed, CONTEXT is important because it provides the surrounding circumstances and background information so we can correctly interpret the question and its meaning.

Not understanding the CONTEXT ... the question can be misunderstood. And questions at times in games show like this ... were meant to confuse and mislead contestants. 

And answers like ZAIRE can be wrong (even if it is right) ... because the message sent was not clear (because I was in a hurry to answer the question and I have forgotten the other variables that also need consideration), and in my case, the nuances in the question were vaguely inferred.

Going back to Jong Hilario's question, I found out that the culprit was in the word KASALUKUYAN. As I said before, I was confident that Zaire was one of the right answers... but with the pesky word kasalukuyan, I was misled to arrive at the wrong conclusion or answers.

Zaire is the old name of the Democratic Republic of Congo ... and the name was changed in 1997. So in the context of the way the question was formed, Zaire is not the kasalukuyan or the present ... it was a thing in the past.

Going back to my original question knowing that the money in question here is almost half a million peso (I know I am not a contestant here and I am not the winner ... but let's just play pretense duuuh) ... just in case the situation comes in real life ... will It's Showtime ever consider my answer ... or they will insist that my answer was out of context. Like what I said?

The reason why I am bringing this up is because (I am not really sure if it's Rainbow Rumble of Luis Manzano) the host considered the candidate's answer when he replied SIAM instead of Thailand.

And in America, another host considered the answers like Persia instead of Iran ... Burma instead of Myanmar ... Holland instead of the Netherlands ... and Ceylon instead of Sri Lanka.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Or this is a fair question. What do you think, guys?

Paging the producer and the hosts of It's Showtime.