Via Crooked Timber
I got a pitiful 18% on this, but have to admit I raced through it. I did learn something* from my scores that would have helped me score higher had I known it before I took this quiz (don't read below the jump line if you want to take it without this hint [and let's face it, it would be really sad if anyone cheated on this one] ):
*I think I would have scored much better if on the ones I had no idea I had increased the plus-or-minus range. I'm sure you're deducted points if that range is too high, but one or two points is better than none if you're out of range altogether.
I got the one about USA having fifty states. I haven't talked about the Magna Carta in forty years.
Posted by: Fabius | August 27, 2004 at 01:00 PM
I managed a 26%, by pure dumb luck. I mean hey...a good many of my answers returned the "you might want to think about your answer a little more" prompt! Favorite example..."carrier bags" (!?).
All in all, a fun way to blow out the cobwebs on a Friday morning, so thanks.
Posted by: aireachail | August 27, 2004 at 01:10 PM
Estimating the quantity of something whose existence you were previously unaware of is a little...unsatisfying. What in the hell is a "carrier bag"?. I'm guessing it's not what you keep an aircraft carrier in.
And who the hell is Tony Benn?
I scored 45%, which is not too bad considering my near-total ignorance of what's surely taught in English schools. And, apparently, of the length of the Nile.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 27, 2004 at 01:11 PM
16%. Oy vey is mir.
Posted by: Phil | August 27, 2004 at 01:15 PM
I concluded carrier bags were shopping bags and guessed about a billion and it turned out to be a billion two hundred million and I was wrong. Why is this question even included? I can see the English history stuff, you know, if you're English, but who keeps tabs of carrier bags in Australia?
Posted by: Fabius | August 27, 2004 at 01:17 PM
45% is extrodinary consider the Brits who were doing the quiz did no better. My 35% was acheived by two extrodinary guesses concerning the distance from Edinburgh to Cardiff (never heard of Cardiff) and the size of the HoC (600 plus/minus somenuber seemed how big it should be). My English history dates were close but wrong (should have widened my MOE) and who is Tony Benn?
Posted by: Fabius | August 27, 2004 at 01:23 PM
Tony Benn is a British labour politician (now, I think, retired). Cardiff is in Wales. I assumed that carrier bags and so forth were in there just to see how well you estimate your possible error when you are totally clueless.
I gave up sometime around the 12th question, since I couldn't figure out whether, when we were supposed to state the plus-or-minus figure in millions or billions or something, we should assume that our answer to the main question was also in millions or billions. Plus, it loaded very slowly for me. Oh well.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 27, 2004 at 01:32 PM
35%
A significant number of these questions I just had no clue about, being an American whose knowledge of English politics and history is sorely lacking. Some of the science questions helped boost my score, though.
Posted by: Chuchundra | August 27, 2004 at 01:37 PM
What indeed are Carrier Bags? they even prompted me that my answer was Far Too Low! i thought they meant handbags or backpacks. If i hadn't lived in London, i never would have scored 32%. I think the smart thing is to widen the margin of error, i stayed a fairly consistent 10, which was a mistake.
Posted by: wilfred | August 27, 2004 at 01:44 PM
I figured they were shopping bags, too.
I got 18%. Apparently I managed to both underestimate Britain's productivity and to overestimate their literacy.
Posted by: Gromit | August 27, 2004 at 01:47 PM
Heh. They clarified the shopping-bag question.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 27, 2004 at 01:50 PM
This is not about estimating anything. This is either knowing or not knowing trivialities.
Posted by: Paul Randall | August 27, 2004 at 01:57 PM
You get 0 points for putting the spread too wide, BTW. I get about the same score for widening the spread on things I truly had no idea about, as I did the first time around. Slighty lower, actually.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 27, 2004 at 02:01 PM
Too British.
Posted by: praktike | August 27, 2004 at 04:10 PM
29%. Way too anglocentric for meaningful consumption. I wonder what the algorithm is to determine scores for exact values. . you get a smaller score the wider your interval is, but it can't be a percentage basis. Obviously, Jesus was born roughly around year 1, so even a tiny variance is a huge percentage change, whereas the year a first women flew in space (ugh. I inserted 'American' unconsciously on this one) would allow for a big variance with small percentage.
Posted by: sidereal | August 27, 2004 at 04:25 PM
I think its being xenocentric* is good for what it's designed to teach you (how you guess). If the details were all thing you should have learned in school, you'd be less likely to focus on the process of guessing and more likely to search your memory for what you think you should know.
*hope I used that right.
Posted by: Edward | August 27, 2004 at 04:30 PM
Huh.
46%
I have always been the trivia God.
Posted by: john casey | August 27, 2004 at 09:00 PM
25%. Fun little test.
Posted by: Moe Lane | August 27, 2004 at 10:21 PM
45%, but it would have been about 48% if I'd put the right damn units on the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
Posted by: Anarch | August 28, 2004 at 04:00 AM
You're in good company, Anarch. IIRC, that's the very thing that killed one of the Mars probes. I still have Earth's radius in permanent storage in nautical miles, which I have to (sometimes several times a day) convert to feet and then to meters.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | August 28, 2004 at 10:24 AM
I pulled off a 36% - most of which wasn't, actually, sheer dumb luck. In fact, I think I would have scored better had I been less cocky about my knowledge of history/geography/politics (getting no points for the "member states of the UN" question is particularly painful to me, and I repeated sidereal's mistake in assuming it was Sally Ride).
I know nothing of England, not even particularly how much a pound is worth.
Posted by: Seth | August 28, 2004 at 06:59 PM
I would have had the height of the Eiffel Tower almost exactly right, but I figured I was probably wildly off and put the margin of error way too large.
Posted by: Stentor | August 28, 2004 at 07:33 PM
44%
I've never even heard of Tony Benn. And dammit, I'm virtually certain the Nile is about 4000+ miles long; this "Lake Victoria" business must be some sort of arbitrary starting point.
Posted by: Tom O'Bedlam | August 29, 2004 at 10:50 PM