This is more MY kind of quiz — but I still blew it

I think I got a little overexcited, and hurried a bit too much. How else do I explain missing the one that asked, “The Pantheon, rebuilt during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, is a major landmark in which European capital city?”

That was really, really stupid. If only I’d read it a tad more carefully. But I was going to miss a couple of others anyway. People who concoct these tests all seem to think to themselves, Let’s throw in a football one, so Brad misses at least that one. So they do. And I did, because I’d never heard of any of the four people I had to chose from.

I had a similar problem with this: “Which song is the highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100 for the band Panic! at the Disco?” Really? That’s a band?

But still, I appreciate the shift to a more general trivia test — since I read less news now, and never read some of the things Slate counts as “news” — and was really enjoying it for the first few questions, thinking I was going to ace it.

Notice that they didn’t go with a staffer as the “ringer” on this one. They went with a “Slate Plus Member,” which is really unfair. We’ve established in the past that the average Slate reader is often smarter than the average Slate editor (and smarter that yours truly, but let’s not get into that).

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how some of y’all like it…

4 thoughts on “This is more MY kind of quiz — but I still blew it”

Norm Ivey August 26, 2022 at 1:16 pm

I was awful. The questions were all pan- related weren’t they? I didn’t pick up on it until I was almost finished.

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Brad Warthen Post authorAugust 26, 2022 at 1:29 pm

And I didn’t pick up on it until you said it. I’m really too dumb to be taking tests, and telling people how I scored.

By the way, I missed another one because of some lifelong stupidity: I’ve never been able to remember which part of Texas is called the “PANhandle.” My answer was right, for the region I was picturing…

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1. Brad Warthen Post authorAugust 26, 2022 at 1:39 pm
  
  Dumb as I am, though, I’ll remind y’all again that for most of my life, I’ve been extremely good at written tests. Some people are good at basketball. I am not. This is my one thing.
  
  But I’m not good at these tests, for whatever reasons. Which fascinates me, so I keep posting my bad scores — as well as my occasional good one…
  
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