41%!

Some of the questions were pretty stacked in favour of brits though (number of counties? please...).

A measly 30%. That thing's a bear. I prefer the Dave Barry method: assume for simplicity that the year of every important event was 1066.

41. Is there a high score list?

I got 41, too (128 points). Unlike Dan I'm too embarrassed to post a link to my results. ;-) (I got two or three things wrong by an order of magnitude and really should have known beter...)

Scoring critique: I tried to be honest and give wide uncertainty ranges when I wasn't too sure. This cost me a lot of points in a few cases where my answer was actually quite close, e.g. the takeoff weight of a 747 - I guessed 500 tonnes, it turned out to be just under 400, but because I had given a range of +/- 400 tonnes, I only got 2 points for that. Still better than Dan's 0 points on his 15 +/- 15 answer which indicates that he similarly misunderstood the significance of the range. (But also that he really has no clue of how heavy an airliner is. ;-) )

Dan got punished really hard (0 points for being two years off) for checking the "exact" checkbox on the year of the English Civil War which I, to my embarrassment, had never even heard of, but guessed 1400 +/- 200 years and got 3 points for that! (Even though my range didn't even include the correct answer, 1642.)

I was convinced it started in 1640 -- my own damn hubris.

Doesn't a score of 40 compared to a score of 39 make you 2.5% smarter?

I got 44%. I can't believe I was off by 22 years on the start of the English civil war (for some reason, I had 1620 on the mind), nor do I believe that there were only 39 counties before the 1974 boundary changes.

Ah, well, pretty good for an American methinks...

Dan got punished really hard (0 points for being two years off) for checking the "exact" checkbox on the year of the English Civil War which I, to my embarrassment, had never even heard of, but guessed 1400 +/- 200 years and got 3 points for that! (Even though my range didn't even include the correct answer, 1642.)

Here's what I don't get: how does the range affect the number of points you get? The More Info page doesn't really let you know.

For example, I "forgot" who Harold II was. I figured he came to the throne sometime during the last millenium, so I put down 1500 +/- 500. OK, so 1066 was the right answer. But that's within my range! Yet I still got zero points. So what's the point of the range again?

Oh yeah, 35% But the stupid quiz is all about the UK fercrissakes! Make it about this country and I'll get a passing grade.

I got a lowly 35
Year of the start of the English Civil War---I thought there were serial civil wars in England.
Tony Benn---who is Tony Benn
Gas, err petrol stations, who cares
Money asylum seekers receive weekly, I entered 100 ponds. England is a socialist state, give those pounds away!
MPs elected to the House of commons--way too many.
Distance to Cardiff fron Edinburgh---to close for their respective citizens.
Latitude of London--way too far left.

I got a 40.

But, on the minutes it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth I put 8, exactly and the exact answer is 8.31, and I only got 1 point for that. Which seems wrong, especialy considering there must be some sort of decimal after .31, making .31 not exactly the exact answer.

And I was only off by 2 floors of the ESB, 1 year on woman in space, and 200 on number of petrol stations.

However my knowledge of English history suggests that Advanced Placement is generous with Euro History 5's.

OT, but U.Wisc and BYU have 2004 election panel study data out at http://csp.polisci.wisc.edu/BYU_UW/data.asp

Fairly interesting stuff.

54 percent...i still think the quiz was stupid though...

42% and I don't even have a PhD
http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=1af8364c8f3d2d3a

54%...but it helps that I teach AP European History and knowing some of this stuff is a large part of my job--especially the dates.

39%, and I do have a Ph.D, but not in English geography! BTW, they are wrong (according to NASA, anyway) about the stars question (and I was right!). Interesting stuff.

Took the quiz - and came to a few of conclusions
- I need to get a life
- For an American, I know way too much about the UK
- My knowledge of UK trivia means I was sober for way too long during the 4 rugby tours of the UK I went on.

Anyway, got an 81%. If it makes Dan happy, I am a UofC alum (College and GSB). Link to my educated guesses is at:
http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=e9b8fe71672fc720

60% = but I must have misentered the act of union

http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=85037db260cf9fd5

An embarassing 34%. Knew some historical things about the UK - Harold, the civil war, but no clue on other items - number of MP's, asylum payments (guessed way too high), number of counties, etc.

An American with 61%. Getting the dates and astronomy exact was a big plus. I didn't know who Benn was either, but I thought it was a good test. I had a few 0's, where I was sometimes off by an order of magnitude, but good guessing is a part of most word puzzles and knowledge games.

I got a 42. Silly stuff, of course, but it was kind of cool to guess the number of words in Pride and Prejudice within about 9%. I'm sure I showed the American-centric thinking Europeans hate-I answered the first woman in space date thinking of the first Americam woman! If I had a PhD my score would've been much lower.

39%; would have expected to beat Bertram, to be honest, but there you are. (Great quiz, Chris Lightfoot - more of the same, please..)

46%. My estimate of the year Tony Blair was born would probably have been pretty good if only the question hadn't been about Tony Benn. I can still pat myself on the back for my spookily accurate WAG about the number of petrol stations.

Soctrates said the beginning of wisdom was knowing what you don't know, so I carefully estimated my errors and only marked "exact answer" for the number of American states. An occasional problem was that my error estimates weren't symmetical but I couldn't put that down.

Anyway, 54.
http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=a226eb25e2a95838

34%, not great. But man, that was a fun quiz. I wish the whole GRE were like that.

55%, but I took a wild guess on some and managed to get it right. For instance, I have no idea who Tony Benn is.

http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=892ff29c8e3d5877

58% Would have been better had I not mixed up Tony Benn with Tony Blair. And Jesus was too born in 4BC

http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=a37a1095bdd1b918

45%. I fouled up a couple of gimmes (1641 and 1703 instead of 1642 and 1707). I did luck out with the Edinburgh-Cardiff distance, which was a wild guess. I was nearly off by a factor of 2 for UK's GDP.

48%. Feh. 1707 not 1705. Harold the II == Harold Godwinson not that other Harold.

http://roughly.beasts.org/scripts/quiz?_eq_web_session=de62c3c7e418e2d4

ash
['Well, that was interesting. Annoying but interesting.']

I got 45%. I thought it was pretty good considering that I know nothing about astronomy.

It would be interesting to do one with a bit more of an American and economic slant. Anyone want to put that together?

40%, but if someone had told me putting the error as big as the value would always get you 0 points, I think I would have got 50%-ish. I actually think that it would make more sense mathematically to just have people guess what they think the value is, and give them a score based on the statistical distribution of answers for each question.

Impressively, though, I was on the right order of magnitude for every single number except the # of stars in the galaxy (I guessed 10,000 bil - correct was 400 bil). I was really close to most things I had no idea about, like the GDP of England (11% off), of words in Pride and Prejudice (15% off), takeoff weight of 747 (24% off), annual Australian plastic bags (28% off).

Overall, I'm glad to be an order-of-magnitude person rather than a trivia person (I got a total of 12 points on the 7 "what year..." questions...)

49%...but I put pretty wide confidence intervals on some things. The stuff about the UK and Australia makes it somewhat more difficult for those of us in the US, but not unfairly so.

50.
It was all or nothing; way too many zeroes in my score.

I got 30, but part of the reason for that is I used the back button to correct an answer missed, and didn't notice that it didn't take.

That and I'm not british and don't even know who Tony Benn is.

Al: I imagine you get zero points if your range is such that it's pretty much certain to contain the correct answer.

54%. I did not realize that when they meant exact they meant exact to several decimals. Thus, I claimed "exact answer" for "share of Earth's surface is water" as 71%, whereas it's 70.8+/-0.05 pct. There were five or six others like that that reduced my score by 10 or so.

I was way off on the number of plastic shopping bags used in Australia (three times as much as I guessed), and, more embarrassingly for an old sf-freak, I claimed the number of stars in the galaxy was 100 bn whereas the true answer is 400 bn +/- 200.

I gave 1040 as the year Harold II became king of England after much thought, because I thought that they could mean either Harold Harefoot or Harold Godwinsson. I went with Harefoot, who I guess never ruled in England (though he did in Denmark). The right answer was Godwinsson 1066.

Fun though.

David