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[bryant]

This is probably the most brutal quiz I've ever seen. Here's last year's. Here are the answers from last year. Ow. I got four this year, assuming I was correct when I think I was, but I'm pretty confident.

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

You know, speaking as a puzzler, this just didn't impress me. It's a whole lot of "you know it or you don't," and when you read the answers you go "OK, I didn't know it," and then you move on. It doesn't even have the feel of things you ought to know, particularly.

For instance, there's one section (apologies if this spoils anyone's enjoyment, but, er, you knew it or you didn't) that's all Cole Porter lyrics. Easy if you know Cole Porter; undoable otherwise.

Now, I could see this being fun to take to a library with two or three friends and saying, "OK, no computers, anything else is fair game. Let's go," and seeing how far you could get in two days. But.

[bryant]

Well, it's a lousy puzzle.

Someone somewhere else made some disdainful comment about trivia, but I think that sort of misses the point of a general knowledge quiz. Call me a Neanderthal, but I think general knowledge is a good thing. Sure, you can Google all this stuff up, but when you bump into a problem for which a given bit of knowledge would be useful in the real world, you won't necessarily know what's useful to know.

Sorry, that was kind of convoluted.

For that matter, there's something to be said for learning how to properly research.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, OK. Let me clarify.

General knowledge is a very good thing. However, the fate of Sansovino's loggetta isn't general knowledge, it's specific knowledge. Similarly, why should Cole Porter lyrics and not Tori Amos lyrics be "general" knowledge? Why are the details of cheese-making "general knowledge"?

This quiz, for the most part, isn't general knowledge; it really is trivia. And the distinction I intended to make before is between trivia where you know it or you don't and trivia where you haven't heard it, but if you think it through, you could reason your way to an answer. Trivial Pursuit has both, and people generally enjoy more the ones where they slap their foreheads when they hear the answer and say, "Ohhhhh! Of course!" then the ones where they roll their eyes and say, "Oh, of course" in heavily sarcastic tones.

And: of course "there's something to be said for learning how to properly research." Hence the motto, “Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est.” But then, “Googling all this stuff up” is research in a sense--certainly I can’t think of any better way to learn what Sansovino's loggetta is. (It comes up immediately on a Google hit. I know where I might start looking in a library, but it would take me quite a while. Is that a bad thing? I don’t see why it should be one, if I found the answer.)

So as I said, my take on it is: interesting challenge to see if you can do a lot of library research, if you want to take it as such; mildly interesting challenge to see if you can Google things; quite uninteresting test of what you do or don’t know.

[bryant]

I note mildly that you could as easily say "Why is King Edward's coronation date general knowledge?" One of the things I liked about this quiz is that there is a very wide range of questions, albeit somewhat slanted towards the British reader.