Category: Games, Tests & Quizzes
Trivia time
Fourteen of the 46 Vice Presidents of the U.S. have become President, so far. Can you name the only one of the 14 who did not immediately succeed the President under whom he served?
Vermont was the 14th state, joining the Union on this date in 1791. Can you name the 13th and 15th states?
Express yourself
How’s your maths?
Take a 10 question test from BBC.
NewMexiKen had eight correct, same as three years ago when I first posted this item.
How many?
In the song The Twelve Days of Christmas how many total gifts are given during the 12 days
Make a guess before you go here to learn the math.
Nice Music, Tough Bunny
Hanging on
This one is tough.
Futbol
Can you keep the soccer ball off the ground?
When you get tired of that, you can watch these guys make some hoops!
Flight of the Season
Improving Your Office Skills
The wind is a killer.
Trivia Challenge 2006
Take the challenge from the International High IQ Society.
NewMexiKen scored 1523. (You’re out if you miss three in a row.)
Production Enhancement Thursday Continues
You didn’t want to work or study today anyway, right?
Drum Machine. It builds slowly!
Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes
Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery
If you are at work and need a diversion, I suggest you leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
Everybody has to cross the river
Said to be a Japanese IQ Test, it’s a game.
Read the summary on the first page, then click to begin (a second page opens). If you can’t figure out on your own how the game works, trust me you won’t be able to solve the test. Unless, of course, you read Japanese.
This is really weird
Let’s shoot some sheep
The Six-Word Memoir Contest
Write your memoir in six words. Write the best six-word memoir and win an iPod Nano.
Presented by SMITH Magazine and Twitter.
Link via Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner. His contribution: “On the seventh word, he rested.”
What Would You Do with a Brain If You Had One?
Chick #1: I gotta read this book for class, and I don’t want to.
Chick #2: Oh, I hate that [stuff]. I hate having to read [stuff] I hate.
Chick #1: I know I don’t want to read it. I don’t get the book, I don’t understand it — it’s stupid
Chick #2: What book you gotta read?
Chick #1: I don’t know, its called, like, Increasin’ Your Brain Power or something.
–E train
Maybe words and stuff wouldn’t be so intimidating if she’d grown up playing with the Leonardo da Vinci Action Figure. “Each figure comes with a paintbrush, an easel, a frame and some of his art and sketches to display.” (Via FunctionalAmbivalent, whose readers appear to have already bought this item out.)
Or spent more time in intellectually challenging activities like Reindeer Arm Wrestling. (Via dangerousmeta!.)
Tough Test
If you skipped an attempt at Edison’s pre-employment test when I posted it last year, here it is again.
Identify Countries of the World
Can you identify countries on a map?
Found at kottke.org.
Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $5 Million
The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, warns us not to count on winning the McDonalds $5 million Monopoly game:
Patrons get game pieces with the purchase of certain menu items or by sending in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. To collect the grand prize this year, a customer must gather four game pieces corresponding to the four railroads on the Monopoly game board. The agate-like official rules say the odds of this happening are “approximately 1 in 41,497,391,309.”
“In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning while on your way home from purchasing a winning Lotto ticket with your wife, Jessica Alba, the first lady of the United States,” Richard Roeper wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. The odds are also far worse than some estimates of the probability of picking a perfect NCAA bracket, as cited in a Numbers Guy column in March.
Cultural Literacy Tests
25-question, graded-as-you go, Cultural Literacy Tests on a number of topics: American and World History, Literature, Geography, Music, Science, Technology, Math.
So far I’ve just taken the two American history tests — I missed one (but got it on the second try).
Update: I aced the geography and did better than I expected on music.
Don’t Vote
Don’t Vote.org has a quiz you can take to see if you can identify 30 individuals (from their photo) and their occupation/job title. Non-partisan, relatively simple and straightforward, but interesting.
Thanks to Nora for the link.
And, oh, NewMexiKen missed two of the 30.
Oh, I Use That Word All the Time
On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY).
Read more from Slate Magazine
After three words it was 239-169. Three words, three “bingoes” (using all seven letters).
I Wish I Thought I Understood This
The Monty Hall Problem Revisited by Joel Achenbach.
Map Game
A well-done map where you drag the name of 35 middle eastern and north African countries to their location on the map. For NewMexiKen it started of easy, but once I got to the “stans,” much more difficult. The map tells you when you make a mistake — you have to get them all correct to finish.
Also, via Andrew Tobias.