Afraid I’m “not quite British”. Got tripped up by that goddamn Doomsday Book*, and, embarrassingly, getting wrong the national flowers of the U.K., which apparently every good citizen must know.
I got 19/24. I got the Welsh national flower correct (by process of elimination), but not the year of women’s suffrage, the year Romans left Britain, the percentage of Christians, what is unique about the British Open, and one other (non-sports) question.
I missed the mountain and the surgery, and the percentage of atheists. I knew quite a lot, like the patron saint of Wales, the year women got the vote, and the houses of Lords & Commons. Also, of course, the Magna Carta. A lot were educated guesses. I did not know the exact year the Spanish Armada was defeated, but I knew which monarch it occurred under.
British would be my second choice of citizenship; Israeli is my first, if it ever comes to having to leave the US. My third is Costa Rica.
22/24, I’m terrible at battles, always get them muddled, but I already passed the main exam by being born to British parents in the UK.
There’s a copy of the official practice book which gets passed round my office, as there’s been a few people ding the exam lately. Someone brought it to lunch once and there were a few questions that no-one on the lunch table got -around half the group were British university lecturers.
21/24 and I’m a Brit I got stymied by the sports questions too, I’m not a fan of football or cricket so not quite sure why I would be expected to know any of that rubbish.
20/24. Got some lucky guesses in regarding names, but failed at a lot of the numbers questions that had fairly close possible answers. At least one of them was a year, which I can sort of understand if it is something famous that has been burnt into every schoolkid’s mind, but the ones with random percentages seem weird to assume that an average Brit might know.
A few years ago I saw a sample version with different questions and there were two that I didn’t know the answer they wanted despite knowing something about the subject despite not being a Brit.
One basically asked if “trick or treating” was a thing on Halloween. I knew from having previously read the Wikipedia article that it had been creeping into the UK, but I didn’t know if the answer they wanted was “no” either due to the Wikipedia article being overblown, the quiz being outdated, or quiz maker wanting to keep British customs intact, or if the answer they wanted was “yes” to make sure naive immigrants didn’t call 999 when strange masked people showed up at their doors.
The other one asked if any non-CoE religious ministers had ever been Lords Spiritual. This was even more tricky, because I knew that the quiz makers were referring to the fact that ministers from other religions have been in the House of Lords but not as Lords Spiritual. But I also knew that there were Lords Spiritual in the house before the church was established and I’m not sure what the quiz makers made of them. Did they forget them, or did the church recognize them in its continuity, or did they not count due to other reasons (or possible wording of the quiz that I forgot).
I guessed wrongly how many people identify as Christian, because there’s a considerable difference between which box people tick on a form and what they actually do in real life.
The longest river question fooled me: I knew I should choose the Severn, but I’ve recently read about there being some – I was going to say controversy, but it’s more like nerdy quibbling* – that it could be the Thames, depending on which tributary you choose as the source.