General knowledge quiz

What it's for

A quick quiz to challenge yourself or friends on geography, history, science and trivia. Each game draws 10 random questions from a larger bank.

How to play

Tap the answer you think is right: it turns green if correct, red if wrong (showing the right one). At the end you get your score and can play again.

Why answering beats rereading

It is one of the most solid findings in the psychology of learning: attempting to retrieve information from memory fixes it far better than rereading it. People who study by rereading feel more confident, because the text seems familiar, but at the test they recall less than people who quizzed themselves. It is the testing effect, measured dozens of times.

Hence a practical consequence for anyone studying: a quiz, even a short one, is worth more than a revision pass. And it is worth even more when you get it wrong, provided the right answer appears at once: an error corrected immediately leaves a stronger trace than an answer guessed right first time.

Multiple choice questions have rules of their own

Whoever writes them knows it: the wrong alternatives have to be plausible, or the question resolves by elimination without knowing anything. An answer longer than the others, one containing «always» or «never», two options saying the same thing differently: these are all clues that allow guessing, and they are faults of the question, not skills of the respondent.

With four alternatives, answering at random gives twenty-five per cent: out of ten questions, two or three correct answers say nothing. It is why a score only means something compared with chance, and why some exams subtract points for wrong answers.

What general knowledge is, and why it is a contested idea

General knowledge questions always reflect one particular culture: that of whoever wrote them. A question about a European river looks general to a European and local to anybody else, and the same goes for literature, music and sport. It is not a correctable flaw, it is the nature of the thing.

It is also why quizzes do not measure intelligence, they measure what you have been exposed to. They remain useful as memory exercise and as a game, and as a way to find out what you do not know: the question you get wrong is the most interesting of all, because it is the only one that teaches something.

How it works in a group

The format that works best in company is not everyone for themselves but mixed teams, with people of different ages: questions from different eras get spread around, and nobody is left out. In pub quizzes it is the unwritten rule that makes evenings fun rather than frustrating.

And it is worth giving each team a joker, that is one question on which to double the points. It changes the game completely: it forces you to judge how sure you are, and turns a memory exercise into a decision, which is the part people remember.

Nearby tools

To play in a group there are Scoreboard and Random team maker, for a tournament Tournament bracket. For other games Guess the word, Riddles and Would you rather.