Category: quizzes

NYT’s wildlife quiz

July 22, 2025 • 11:15 am

I swear that the NYT seems to be inserting more and more fluff in the paper in lieu of news (well, at least on the front e-page). But sometimes that’s ok, so long as you don’t mind the Gray Lady becoming the National Enquirer. 

But I’m a sucker for a quiz—especially one on biology. And if you click below you’ll find ten questions, each with four answers, about how to deal with potentially dangerous animals (click here to see the archived version). You can also see the questions archived here, but you can’t see whether your answers are right. In the regular paper, if you’re right you get an instant check mark, but if you’re wrong you get a red “X” but the right answer is shown with a check. Good luck; give your scores below (see mine further down) but please don’t reveal the questions or answers in the comments.

I got only 50% of the questions, but it seems that that is a decent score given that random guessing would give only 25% (yes, somebody will point out that 5 out of ten is not significantly different from 2 or 3 out of ten, but don’t be a wiseass).

Here’s my score:

AI quiz: can you tell the real image?

May 27, 2025 • 1:00 pm

Matthew sent me this qui, involving ten pairs of photos in Brittanica Education. The object is to see whether you can tell which is generated by AI and which is real.  Click on the headline below to go to the quiz, which is fun to take. After you click on which photo you think is real, the explanation of why you should have known pops up.

Here is one pair of photos, but take the quiz yourself, which is quick.  Matthew says “I got 10/10”, but poor PCC(E) got only 9/10. Some are more obvious than others.

Have a look and then go to the quiz. Give us your score and then beef if you wish. This is the last one:

Morning music quiz

September 16, 2022 • 8:30 am

We’ll see who can answer this, and you have to get both parts. Put your answers in the comments, but DO NOT LOOK THERE before you answer.

Name two rock songs, released less than four years apart, that have the phrase “goin’ to Carolina” in them.

There are no prizes, but if you get both then you not only know your rock, but also have good taste in rock.

WEIT quiz

August 2, 2022 • 9:15 am

Once again I’m debilitated from lack of sleep, having slept for a handful of hours last night. I have no idea why my insomnia recurred, as I’m following my sleep hygiene rules pretty carefully. But the upshot is that my brain isn’t working well, and posting is a huge effort.  It will be light today, and I’ll divert my minimal energy into preparing talks for my upcoming lecture cruise to the Galápagos.

But I thought I’d pose ten questions to the readers of this site to see how attentive they are. (Yes, this is a bit solipsistic.) To answer them all, you’d have to have been a reader for a while. Some are easy, others aren’t, but no Googling or searching the site allowed.

1.) What does PCC(E) stand for?

2.) Give two reasons why canids are usually spelled “d*g” on this site

3.) Why don’t I like WEIT to be called a “blog”? What’s the preferred term for the site?

4.) What is the name of my favorite duck, and how many years in succession have I taken care of her?

5.) How did this website get started?

6.) What was the name of my last cat, and what kin of cat was it?

7.) From what region does my favorite red wine come?

8.) What must all readers do before they put up their first comment?

9.) What is the name of Steve Pinker’s teddy bear? (This was the subject of a contest a long time ago.)

10.) What was the great insight I had on an acid trip when I was in college?

Take this quiz: Which of six new political parties do you belong to?

September 9, 2021 • 9:15 am

The New York Times’s opinion section has started a new series whose purpose is outlined in the article below by By Ezekiel Kweku, the Opinion politics editor. 

But America is not young anymore. Whereas it was once spry and excitable, it is now creaky and soft. The country that passed Prohibition and created Social Security now spends decades dithering over how large a role the government should play in health care. The country that went to the moon shrinks at the challenges presented by climate change. Its bold and expansive political imagination has atrophied.

There are, of course, reasons for this settling. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr argues in a guest essay, hard partisanship makes it difficult to create coalitions for sweeping changes. Wars, which once smashed through gridlock, no longer lead to collective action.

Not all of the big changes were completely — or even ambiguously — good. The economic boom of the industrial age was fueled by the blood and sweat of exploited workers; the country’s westward expansion came at the expense of Native Americans. But America in its youth was a country confident and unafraid to confront the future. What if it could recover that spirit of invention and restlessness, the risk-taking that formed this country? What would it change? What could it be?

This is the idea behind Snap Out of It, America!, a new series from Times Opinion. It will present not a single, cohesive vision but an array of ambitious ideas from across the ideological spectrum to revitalize and renew the American experiment.

The series will come out every Wednesday, but I’m not going to be paying a lot of attention. Click on the screenshot to read Kewku’s whole article

Now the fun part: a quiz! Yesterday, as part of this series, the Times decided to revitalize America by imagining not two but six political parties falling on a two-dimensional plot of social conservatism and economic conservatism. There’s a brief intro of the seemingly thin rationale at the screenshot below:

America’s two-party system is broken. Democrats and Republicans are locked in an increasingly destructive partisan struggle that has produced gridlock and stagnation on too many critical issues — most urgently, the pandemic and climate change.

There is no reasonable or timely way to fix this broken system. But there is an alternative: more parties.

It is not so hard to imagine a six-party system — and it would not even require a constitutional amendment.

The description of how to get to such a system is below. But first, whether you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent (or other), in the 20-question quiz below, you can discover which new party would be the best fit for you.

Now that’s gonna work. We’ll have the Christian Conservative Party, the Patriot Party, the American Labor Party, the Growth and Opportunity Party, the New Liberal Party, and the Progressive Party.

Which one would you belong to given your social and political views. Click on the screenshot below to take the 20-question quiz. At the end it will slot you into one of the six parties and tell you a bit about it. If you want to skip the quiz and read about these imagined parties, just go here.

 

Here’s the first of 20 questions; many of them are about race:

I took the quiz twice independently several hours apart, and both times fell into the same party. (I didn’t remember my answers to the first round.)


This is a description of that party:

The New Liberal Party is the professional-class establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Members are cosmopolitan in their social and racial views but more pro-business and more likely to see the wealthy as innovators.

Its potential leaders include Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Eric Garcetti and Beto O’Rourke. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 26 percent of the electorate.

I guess I can’t be unhappy with that, as I’m on the liberal side of both economics and social attitudes. Still, I don’t know what this means, what I’m supposed to do about it, or how I can use my slot to revitalize America.

Of course you’ll want to know where you fall, too, so comment below and we’ll put a quiz here showing where readers fall.

Which party were you closest to?

View Results

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h/t: Paul

A tricky quiz

May 13, 2021 • 1:15 pm

Reader Bryan sent me this quiz made by  Presh Talwalkar. Your job is to catch all five errors in the sentence below. Can you do that? Are you a genius? Bryan adds this:

Personally, I think the interesting thing isn’t finding the “mistakes” – as such, but how long and how many readings – the thought process – it takes to do it.
DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS BEFORE YOU TRY, AS READERS ARE GIVING THEIR GUESSES BELOW.

Answers to the “young musicians quiz” (and two more to guess)

April 21, 2021 • 8:00 am

Yesterday’s “Guess the music stars” quiz, which showed famous musicians (rock and country) as young kids and asked you to guess who they were, got a surprising amount of attention. In lieu of today’s wildlife photos (send yours in, please!), I’ll give you the answers to yesterday’s quiz, along with my comments.

The photos came from a set published on the “Don’t worry be happy” public Facebook page on May 4 of last year, and you can see the photos, and others I didn’t show, at this link. I was surprised at how few were guessed correctly by most people, but of course I knew the answers when I posted them, so to me it seemed easier than it really was.  But on to the photos!

1.) Carlos Santana.  This would have been one of the hardest for me to guess, I think, but a fair number of people got it.

2.) Ron Wood. This would have been tough for me as well because I’m not a big Stones fan.

3.) Neil Young. COME ON, PEOPLE! How could you miss this one?

4.) John Lennon. Another toughie.

5.) Johnny Cash. Maybe the overalls would help given his poor background as a farmer’s son.

6.) Janis Joplin. Of course! Lots of people got this one.

7.) David Bowie. Another hard one.

8.) Freddie Mercury.  Did anybody get this?

9.) Van Morrison. You can sort of see the future rock star in there. . .

10.) Mick Jagger. Lord, this one isn’t easy!

11.) Jim Morrison. Another hard one.

12.) Paul McCartney. Come on! This is dead easy!

13.) Keith Richards. Not easy. . .

14.) Elvis Presley. Everybody should have gotten this one.

15.) Sting (Gordon Sumner). Not that easy.

16.) Chuck Berry. Not that easy, either.

17.) Ringo Starr. In my view, this one’s easy.

18.) Same as #5, Johnny Cash.

19.) George Harrison. The hair color would throw you off if nothing else.

20.) Mark Knopfler.  A fair few people got this one, but I wouldn’t have.

Since you did so well, here are two more musicians to guess. All comments and guesses below, please.

21.)

22.)