In the past, I’ve posted links to quizzes on political science, history and other such topics. I’ve done so partly because I thought y’all might enjoy taking the tests, and partly (largely) to give me an excuse to brag on my way-higher-than-average scores.
But there’s a kind of test I’m not all that good at.
I don’t do well on current-events quizzes. Sounds odd, huh, since I’ve spent all those years in the news business.
Well, I have a couple of reasons/excuses to offer for this. One is that I’m a big-picture guy. If you test me on broad knowledge of history or political science, or I don’t know, popular culture, and make it the kind of test that is so broad you can’t possibly study for it (you either know the stuff or you don’t), I tend to do well. I know a lot, in general, about how the world works.
But if you narrow it down to specifics, in a particularly limited field — such as what happened this past week — I don’t do as well.
Second, these quizzes tend to run to oddball stories, and those are the ones I so often miss. I scan the main pages of top newspapers every morning, and that tends to form my frame of reference. Meanwhile, people who watch a lot of TV news see all these quirky little gossipy stories that I tend to miss. This was always a sore point for Robert Ariail in working with me. He’d come in with a cartoon idea, and I’d ponder it and say, “What’s this about?” And he’d be like, “You’re kidding me! This is all over! There’s no way you’ve missed this…”
That said, I did miss one serious, important news-story question on this quiz. I’d tell you what it was, but I’d have to give away the answer.
See if you can do better than I did. It shouldn’t be hard, since y’all are smart and my score was way below average.
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I do pretty well on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, especially the limerick challenge. Maybe I should try to win Carl’s voice on my voicemail answer?
I do well on the limerick challenge, too — but you can almost tell what those are by the rhyme setup…
I did worse than you faster ….. I got 7 of 12. In my defense the beginning of the school year sucks up all my spare brain cells – I’ve only listened to my ipod and not the news for the past two weeks. I just go through phases like that.