Over at the goddycoddling National Geographic site, science writer Ed Yong has constructed two quizzes testing your ability to suss out what animal David Attenborough is talking about. (Yong has also ranked 79 episodes of Attenborough’s shows in a piece at The Atlantic.) There are two quizzes: A “Really Hard” one, and a “Really, Really Hard One.” As Yong notes,
Each consists of ten quotes from one of his classic series, from Life on Earth in 1979 to Life in Cold Blood in 2008. Your job is to work out which animal he’s talking about. Enjoy!
You get a choice of four animals for each quote.
And boy, did I do poorly! I got only 3 of the 10 correct in the “Really Hard” quiz, but 4 in the “Really, Really Hard” quiz. Still, I had to guess a lot.
Of course you will take both quizzes and post your results below!
h/t: Mark Sturtevant
Oh, lordy, did I do bad!
Can’t do worse than zero, which is what I got on the first quiz. Statistically I should have gotten at least 2 correct by chance!
7/10 for the 1st & 8/10 for the 2nd.
That’s disgusting!
6 and 4, but also a lot of guessing.
Ouch, my ego! 3 correct answers on each quiz. Great stuff though. Glad I’m in such elite company😉
My results on the quiz was exactly the same: 3 out of 10 on the Hard Hard quiz and 4 on the Very Hard Hard
6/10 on each. The quiz *did* say that David Attenborough would be proud of my results, but where I work that’s a D.
Too fun! My results show that I am an adept guesser (9/10, 10/10). Without the skill my score would have been 5/10 and 4/10.
4/10 in the really hard
6/10 in the really really hard…
Fun quiz.
Take an Attenborough quiz? I would have better chances against Mike Tyson in the ring.
Result just in: Buster Douglas aced the really hard Attenborough quiz, then went on an eating binge and was 0-for-10 on part 2.
You have to forgive yourself for getting many of these wrong. For most questions a couple of the wrong choices actually seem equally if not more reasonable. You have to be an Attenborologist to do really well.
Yeah, like when did birds have armpits?
Since Sherlock Holmes realize that when you eliminate the implausible ones, the plausible remains. Or something like that, because I could eliminate on precisely that question.
Ha! That’s one I got right. Lots of sandpipers display using axillary feathers.
For the record: 6/10, 5/10.
My 4yo grandson and I watch Life in the Undergrowth over and over so I got the Springtail right off.
When he was really little we watched Micro Cosmos over and over.
4 and 2. I are smrt.
4 on each, plus several “that would have been my next guess”.
ditto
When Mark and Jerry gangs up on you, you know you will have a hard time. (Of course you can always pull a Müllerian mimicry and pretend that it is raining – and that you love the rain and is out.)
I got hubris on the first quiz, with 4 straight As. And one of them looked like a “mud skipper” as we say after a famous show where that was a correct, alternate answer that had been overlooked. So I guess I could have guessed better on the last half… 4/10.
More spread on the last one, with 5/10 Some stupid mistakes too…
Seems Young misread the relative difficulty.
I got zero (0) on the first quiz and 50% on the second. Total guessing all the way! I do see some excellent scores in the comments–probably huge Attenborough fans who have seen every episode multiple times…
I scored 3 and 4, with a lot of guessing. I don’t think it is enough to merely watch Attenborough, but to watch his shows many times. Not that that is so difficult, I think I have watch about all his nature docos at least once. We’ve just had his three part series on the Barrier Reef some weeks ago.
He’s an institution, but I think a lot of people might not realise that another of his remarkable acts was the commissioning of Monty Pythons Flying Circus for the BBC. He has a lifetime of achievements and if he decided to take of his shoes and kick back (at 90! that’s just an exclamation mark not a factorial) nobody would mind, we’d think he had earned it. I can’t imagine him doing that though.
I’ve almost never seen an Attenborough show; just clips on YouTube. Can I adjust my score upwards?
Didn’t he also commission the second or third series of Dr Who, AND employ a certain “DNA,” and then give him a long enough strand to make Pangalactic rope with.
6 on the first, 4 on the second, so am gloating moderately.
It brings to mind a question PCC raised some time back about why we buy books based on the author’s name. I’d probably watch anything Attenborough has done, because his name is associated with it. This is not because his name has cache but because he has a solid reputation for producing high quality tv material.* To be fair he has had excellent crews supporting him behind the camera and in the studio, and we shouldn’t forget that, and the BBC has probably been setting the standard for nature docos for a few decades now.
So why do we read books because of the author, or watch tv and films because of the actors, directors, and presenters? Because they are a predictor of the quality we can expect, the enjoyment (or whatever) we should receive from spend the time with the material. I made the mistake of reading all of GoT, waiting for the story lines, ANY of them, to be satisfactorily resolved. What a waste! I don’t think I’ll bother with anything written by Whatsisname again.
* “It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!” – Tom Lehrer
What’s GoT?
I got 7/10 on both and found them similar. I just watch my Attenborough DVDs when I’m drunk and it kind of sticks. Also I haven’t seen the last two series so I can only remeber the other “Life” series.
I wish I could get paid to remeber this important trivia:)
Don’t you wish you could get paid to remember how to spell “remember”? 🙂
Can I kiss you from afar?
Really Hard: 3/10
Really Really Hard: 4/10
4/10 first one, 3/10 second one
Really really, 6/10 ; didn’t try the other quiz. Not a lot of guessing, but some were working on fairly distant memories.
My 12 yo daughter and I got 4 on the first one and 5 on the second.
We disagreed on a few and could’ve gotten more right. e.g. I liked the puffin, but thought her reasoning about the barnacle geese was good.
Oops the penguin, not the puffin (that was another question!!)
2/10 and then 4/10…. I guessed most of them.
From an early age I made sure that Sir Attenborough was a part of her day. As was Carl Sagan, Bach and Freddie Mercury.
Hard quiz: 7/10
Really, really hard quiz: 8/10
I’m kicking myself over the one about the “unbirdlike song”; I knew that one, but I couldn’t remember it properly until I saw the answer and I went “Of course!”
The really nice bit was recognizing a lot of the quotes the instant I saw them, because some of them were favourite moments for me. I never forgot the one about the creature that breaks, for example, because I always wondered what the largest one was and that moment settled it.
Thank you for the link to the list of 79 episodes. What a great list.