It’s not all that difficult. If someone did well on on the test does that tell you anything about them?
Doesn’t tell me squat. I didn’t miss a question, and I have huge gaps in my bank of knowledge. Although missing the majority of the questions might indicate a “less-than-inquiring” mind. Not stupid by any means, but unexposed or more particularly focused.
I got “There Are 0 Gaps in Your Knowledge”.
Does that mean I got all 21 questions right?
The questions are rather widely scattered among various branch of knowledge, and if someone did well on this test, I would assume that they were well read and interested in many different kinds of things.
Count me in as also getting a perfect score.
Arrrgh! It won’t tell me which one I got wrong?! Diediediediedie…
It tells me that I know that I am a hell of a Trivial Pursuit player and that I would have the potential to do really well at Jeopardy!
It wasn’t hard. What should that say about me?
I was not certain about the last two, but still got all 21 correct.
I’d say anyone who got 18 or more correct is probably decently educated or fairly well read. I’d suspect your average American would get 12 or fewer correct.
21 out of 21. Ironically, the only question I had to guess on was the only one that was in my field. :o
But yea, the questions aren’t particularly difficult. I imagine anyone thats intellectually curious and reads a decent amount would get most of them correct.
I’m a braniac
BRANIAC
On the floor
I got a perfect as well, and I’m not prepared to say that I’m well-read. I am prepared to say that I have a strong memory for dates and people and that the quiz is really geared toward rote memorization rather than understanding and knowledge.
It strikes me that the test is composed primarily of questions that focus on Western art, history, and philosophy. I think creating a test this way and then purporting that it will identify gaps in one’s knowledge is meant subtly to indicate that these are the only subjects that count when it comes to calling oneself well-rounded. That is, the origin of this test seems to come from the same place that deprecates the need to do things such as study, say, African-American literature (“Did you hear, Allan, Harvard is having its students read something call The Bluest Eye by some Anthony Morrison fellow. And they’ve stopped assigning Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus! What is the world coming to!” These are also people who say things like A Separate Peace, a novel about rich boys at prep school in the 1940s, has a universal message, but Things Fall Apart is limited in its humanism.)
So yes, a person could get a perfect score (as I did) and still have plenty of gaps in their knowledge of what today ought to count as the canon for well-educated citizens of the world.
I got them all right. I have no college education, but I read a lot and try to pay attention and learn new things. The test was relatively easy. I never watch Jeopardy or play Trivial Pursuit, but maybe I should try that out sometime.
I wonder if all the years I have spent reading the Dope have anything to do with my score. 
No, it doesn’t. Since the back button was not disabled, I took a few minutes to play around with the answers. There are three questions in each of seven categories:
[ul]
[li]Philosophy[/li][li]Religion[/li][li]Economics[/li][li]Literature[/li][li]History[/li][li]Science[/li][li]Art[/li][/ul]
You are allowed to miss one question in each category for the lowest possible percentage score of 67% while maintaining zero gaps in knowledge. Sorry to rain on the parade of all of you who thought you achieved a perfect score, but it’s likely that you didn’t.
Whuuh? :mad: Well, I still got them all. Pff.
Well then bearing that in mind, doing well on the test means that you get to live, for now… cue ominous music
But really, I think it’s shows up interesting gaps in someone’s knowledge if they do badly. It might make you wonder why they have those gaps, if they seem otherwise intelligent. Do they just not care? Are they only interested in one particular thing? Maybe they have trouble reading, and never absorbed information that way? Maybe they went to a bad school? Or maybe they were raised by crazy religious people and they were never allowed to know half of those things?
Knowing how someone else did on that would just raise questions for me, no conclusions really.
I got them all right. I think every question on that test is pretty basic knowledge. I don’t think you even have to have gone to college to pick up most of the answers.
If someone did well on this test I would think they paid attention in life.
To add a bit of humor, I achieved “There Are 0 Gaps in Your Knowledge” with the following answers:
-
Who said “Je pense donc je suis”… meaning, “I think therefore I am”?
Michel Foucault
René Descartes
Friedrich Nietzsche
** Ayn Rand** -
What do you call a religion that believes in multiple deities?
Monotheistic
Polytheistic
Polyamorous
Godful -
When prices are mostly going down, this is known as:
Inflation
** Holiday blues**
Stagflation
Deflation -
Who wrote “A Christmas Carol”?
Jim Henson
Mark Twain
William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens -
From the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, what empire was India a part of?
The Byzantine empire
** The Catholic empire**
The British empire
The Ottoman empire -
How many legs does an insect have?
2
8
** 4**
6 -
Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Andy Warhol
Leonardo da Vinci
Claude Monet
Vincent van Gogh
There are no gaps in my knowledge and I have the internet score to prove it!
The question about which planet is closest to the Earth could have been either Mars or Venus.
I don’t think the test says much other than high scorers are reasonably well read and that my liberal arts degree finally helped me.
I suspect that there are times when Mercury is the closest planet, when Venus and Mars are on the other side of the Sun.
I don’t think doing well necessarily says much about a person, given that most of the questions are things I’d expect a reasonably educated person to know, but doing badly would suggest that they either weren’t very well educated or just weren’t paying attention.
I assumed an unstated, “at its closest…” This is the only question I hesitated on, but guessed correctly based on inference based on their appearance in the sky.
If someone does well on this test I would assume they managed to stay awake during grade school.