Hey HN! 7 years ago you helped launch my site Test Your Vocab... and now I was inspired to do something similar, only for cultural knowledge. Would love any/all feedback.
Edit: sorry about the 5 min database outage! I'm keeping an eye on server memory and will upgrade my instance if it happens again, but it's all back to normal now, and reloading the page for whatever step you got stuck on should work.
Edit 2: resized to a much larger droplet, apologies again, should be no more out-of-memory. Again, reloading the page will let you continue in the quiz where you left off.
I just took the vocab test and I scored around 9800 words, I've been thinking on improving my vocabulary but it was difficult to know how bad or good I was. Now thanks to your site I know where I am and how far should I aim to, thanks!
Thanks showing this!
I scored 78%, which I guess is pretty good considering I spent a lot of time reading on reddit lol
I found it kinda interesting that i got quite a few Indian and Asian American musicians/actors. I'm guessing Bollywood is very popular in the UK and in certain sections of the US.
I would also like to know how you selected the criteria of what is popular.
This definitely took me back to the days when Facebook quizes were novel and were all the rage.
You'll actually see a fair amount of footballers, British royalty, and Bollywood stars... it's according to popularity on en.wikipedia.org, so it not's just the US.
Mine worked fine - I received a score of 58%. Somewhat surprising, I felt as if I was doing very well! Cool tool OP, hope you get the errors sorted out.
Interesting although I would bet cash that the anonymous part is total bull given the request for zip code. I'm not sure how I should feel about the 89%. I don't have cable, so I only watch some podcasts and TV when I visit the relatives.
I know it can feel that way but I promise you it's not. :)
I'd like to do a blog post showing which cultural interests have the most geographic variation in the US together with maps (and which areas of the US are "most culturally distinctive"), and asking for zip codes is just an easier UX than asking for cities or counties. And all survey questions are optional to answer.
(To sibling commenter: zip code only appears if you select United States as nationality.)
I am disapointed that much of the Culture is actually Pop culture, as so few items are relating to people or event before the '80s.
As a 33 yo person, I recall the general knowledge quizzes I went through as a teenager (french school). Most of it was about literature and science, and it would end with just a few questions about contemporary stuff.
> Good job! You know 2,950 out of the top 10,000 items.
> This means you know more than 36% of Americans aged 18+:
Not too bad, seeing as there's never been a time of my life that I ever cared about pop culture.
I just reran the test having ticked none of the boxes and still entering the same data at the end, and it gave me a 0% score, so at least the test is "real". I was skeptical that the tick boxes were just a red herring.
I was a little unsure about the criterion of "can uniquely identify". I left a bunch of things blank if I felt that I had little or no idea "who someone is" even if I had certainly heard the name before.
For example, I left actors and singers blank if I didn't know any works involving them or what genres they work in (or whether they're still alive), and I left sports figures blank if I didn't know what country or team they played for or whether they're still active, even if in each case I had heard that there was such a person. Is that the intended approach? Is what consistent with what other people did?
Similarly, I left movies blank if I had no idea what the movie was about or what kind of movie it was, or what story it was based on, even if I'd heard that there was such a movie.
Thanks! Yes, deciding how to define whether you know something or not wasn't easy. Eventually I settled on "uniquely identify" and I'm happy you understood it correctly -- it's not enough just to have heard of somebody or something, but you need to be able to name one (any) unique fact about them.
Does it count if I can uniquely identify the person/thing after having seen the Wikipedia overlay? For example, I saw a name that sounded vaguely familiar, but once I saw their picture, I recognized who they were and what TV show I knew them from. But I couldn't necessarily have drawn that connection from just the name.
Put another way: are you testing that I know of the entity itself, or that I know the entity and its/their name?
EDIT: another example: For a given novel title, I could probably have recalled who the author was (which would seem to be "a unique fact about [it]") but not anything about the plot. However, you listed the author right under the title, so... did I "know" that novel?
That's what I did too. If I had heard of the person, even if I've heard of them a lot (example: Niki Minaj... all I knew was a hunch that she's in the entertainment industry) but had no idea who they are or what they look like, I left it blank.
You'll actually see a fair amount of footballers, British royalty, and Bollywood stars... it's according to popularity on en.wikipedia.org, so it not's just the US.
The quiz is adaptive, so perhaps you got more American specific questions than I did?
For me there were plenty of British specific questions. I also saw a fair amount of Bollywood questions, and there were plenty of non-American athletes as well. Considering the relative dominance of American and British cultural exports on the English speaking world, the mix seemed about right.
> Good job! You know 2,100 out of the top 10,000 items.
> This means you know more than 13% of Americans aged 18+:
I was born and raised in the USA, but I grew up without a television, 5 miles up a dirt road in a house built by my parents with hand tools. Kerosene lamps, outhouse, generator, etc.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadEdit: sorry about the 5 min database outage! I'm keeping an eye on server memory and will upgrade my instance if it happens again, but it's all back to normal now, and reloading the page for whatever step you got stuck on should work.
Edit 2: resized to a much larger droplet, apologies again, should be no more out-of-memory. Again, reloading the page will let you continue in the quiz where you left off.
I found it kinda interesting that i got quite a few Indian and Asian American musicians/actors. I'm guessing Bollywood is very popular in the UK and in certain sections of the US.
I would also like to know how you selected the criteria of what is popular.
This definitely took me back to the days when Facebook quizes were novel and were all the rage.
Even in incognito mode it chooses my native language.
Internal error Sorry, but something went wrong with our code. Retrying may or may not fix it. (19284)
(Retrying does not fix it.)
(url: https://testyourculture.com/step_three?u=zmtPIg)
I'd like to do a blog post showing which cultural interests have the most geographic variation in the US together with maps (and which areas of the US are "most culturally distinctive"), and asking for zip codes is just an easier UX than asking for cities or counties. And all survey questions are optional to answer.
(To sibling commenter: zip code only appears if you select United States as nationality.)
Weird, I'm somewhat sure I know more than most of my peers. It would be cool if they showed average stats by region / country.
I did the same thing a long time ago for English vocabulary scores per country:
http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-09-10-Results-by-country
> Amazing knowledge! You know 7,200 out of the top 10,000 items. > This means you know more than 98% of Americans aged 18+
I guess it helped that I'm Indian and could get some of the Bollywood stuff off the bat!
Not too bad, seeing as there's never been a time of my life that I ever cared about pop culture.
I just reran the test having ticked none of the boxes and still entering the same data at the end, and it gave me a 0% score, so at least the test is "real". I was skeptical that the tick boxes were just a red herring.
Sounds like average? Though I don't have much time to be "in tune" with modern pop culture
For example, I left actors and singers blank if I didn't know any works involving them or what genres they work in (or whether they're still alive), and I left sports figures blank if I didn't know what country or team they played for or whether they're still active, even if in each case I had heard that there was such a person. Is that the intended approach? Is what consistent with what other people did?
Similarly, I left movies blank if I had no idea what the movie was about or what kind of movie it was, or what story it was based on, even if I'd heard that there was such a movie.
Put another way: are you testing that I know of the entity itself, or that I know the entity and its/their name?
EDIT: another example: For a given novel title, I could probably have recalled who the author was (which would seem to be "a unique fact about [it]") but not anything about the plot. However, you listed the author right under the title, so... did I "know" that novel?
I'm pretty happy about that, given that:
1. I'm italian
2. I don't have a good memory at all
3. Many items were out of my area of interests (wrestlers, superhero movies...)
You'll actually see a fair amount of footballers, British royalty, and Bollywood stars... it's according to popularity on en.wikipedia.org, so it not's just the US.
For me there were plenty of British specific questions. I also saw a fair amount of Bollywood questions, and there were plenty of non-American athletes as well. Considering the relative dominance of American and British cultural exports on the English speaking world, the mix seemed about right.
> This means you know more than 13% of Americans aged 18+:
I was born and raised in the USA, but I grew up without a television, 5 miles up a dirt road in a house built by my parents with hand tools. Kerosene lamps, outhouse, generator, etc.