Ask the audience.

[andrewducker]

If you click on the link you'll get to a quiz which is pretty darned easy (although I still managed to get two questions wrong). What I find interesting is the breakdown by gender/race.

[Poll #920408]

Comments

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

I got 80 percent. Yay for US-centric questions!

[andrewducker]

Strangely, that didn't bother me - I've clearly spent enough time either watching US TV/films or roleplaying in US settings that I have a reasonable grasp of their geography/history :->

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

I got two wrong as well but only scored 89.76%

I guess the world got sightly smarter in the last 15 minutes...

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

There are some traditionally black colleges in the area and the woman who ran the school at which I used to work had a Masters from one of them. Her biggest issue was the misuse of words. It's a fairly common issue with grads from traditionally black schools. It's a different use of language, but it would totally skew this sort of test.

The gender differences.... I couldn't tell you how long a mile is if you paid me. I suck at spacial-relations and I think a lot of women do. Not necessarily because we lack the capability for it (though a certain amount of it can't be learned) but because it's one of those things that is just never expected of us to know. To be really, really simplistic about it -- men are traditionally better with numbers and spatial relations and women are traditionally better with language. It sucks, but no matter what the cause, it still funtions that way.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

but the long answer to your question is that there are fairly stable ethnic and gender differences in average IQ, but I don't think this quiz can either elicit or demonstrate them.

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

I bombed badly. This is because we use metric in physics as the only countries to still use British Imperial Measurements is the U.S.A. and Australia. That and I can barely think where anywhere in the U.S. is, never been and no real intention of going except for Las Vegas (to marry the beloved) and San Francisco (on a pilgrimage to the grave of Joshua Norton) and perhaps Paris, Texas. Other than that maybe I should retry when I have actually got more than a couple of hours of sleep. I mean getting five wrong is a scandal.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

94.11%, I missed one -- and really, I know a kilo weighs more than a pound, I just wasn't thinking. I think part of the problem is that so many of the questions are worded like they're trick questions, and I found myself overthinking them.

As for differences in results? Hell, I don't know. The Rat Pack question, though, was weird -- all the fans of the Rat Pack I've known in my life have been male, and that question involves knowing what the Rat Pack even vaguely is before you can pick out the missing item (I have no idea when Frank Sinatra died, so I took a guess and got it right, go me). The estimation questions are also 'male', and I'd like to see how it'd change if they were substituted with 'which is more, a tablespoon or a teaspoon?' Agreed that the questions are US-centric, for what that's worth.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

23/25 - couldn't work out which ones I got wrong.

[neferet.livejournal.com]

21/25, but only because there are a lot of Americocentric questions in there, which I think may bias some peoples scores.

[thadrin.livejournal.com]

I got them all.
I'm pretty sure I'm not that smart.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

With one wrong, I got a 96.88%. I don't think the breakdown by gender/race is more meaningful than anything else about this quiz.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

According to a poster in the_ferrett's LJ the percentage changes if you change gender/ethnicity. I'm almost tempted to test that, but have enough mindless time wasting activities to do already.

[birdofparadox.livejournal.com]

I managed to get 25/25 with only a half a cup of coffee in me, putting me in the 97.33 percentile for gender/race.

I imagine those statistics are skewed given the sort of people who generally respond to meme-quizzies, to boot.