sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the

A question that is very important and difficult or complex to answer. Taken from the title of the 1950s television game show based on the earlier radio program Take It or Leave It, which popularized the phrase "the sixty-four-dollar question." The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question now is whether he should choose his former opponent as a running mate. A: "Do you want to get Italian or Chinese tonight?" B: "Well, that's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn't it?"

The hardest question of all; the crucial question. This term comes from the name of a popular television quiz show of the 1950s in which $64,000 was the top prize. It in turn may have been an inflation of the earlier sixty-four dollar question, named for the top prize on a CBS radio quiz show Take It or Leave It, which ran throughout the 1940s. This cliché may soon join its forerunner in obsolescence.