The King William’s College quiz 2021 | Hacker News Reader

The King William’s College quiz 2021

theguardian.com

30 pointsJoachimS12 comments

The King William's College quiz is set by a particular fee paying English school for its pupils every Christmas and published by the Guardian. Its full of English cultural references and designed to be hard. I assume the idea is that the pupils take it home for the holidays and work on it with their families. Each section has a theme that connects the answers in that section. My partner's family love wrangling out the odd answer or three between christmas and new year.

The background of the test is interesting[1], I feel a little better that I only spotted a handful I knew off the bat if 2 correct is considered 'a common score'.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William%27s_College#Gener...

King William's College is located in the Isle of Man, not in England.

Thanks for the correction.

I like the concept. If anything, it gives a conversation filler/starter for any awkward family dinners otherwise during the Holidays.

That being said, the internet has probably made a test like this easier than it has been in the past. Although I dare say many of the answers will require Google-fu/Wikipedia wizardry of a quite high level.

From Wikipedia...

> The current quizmaster is Dr Pat Cullen, a retired general practitioner, who has been setting the quiz since 1997. He reports that he now checks questions by typing them into Google and changing them if necessary to make sure the answers cannot be found immediately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William%27s_College

Unfortunately for him, I use Bing.

This is extremely British. Could anyone across the pond tell me if any of this is general knowledge?

As an American, these questions read like prompts about plot lines in a soap opera I've never heard of.

I was able to answer one question on my first reading of the questions, and a further 3 after going directly to the relevant Wikipedia page. Many others can be answered with some skilled use of Wikipedia/Google.

Of section 1, 1.2 and presumably 1.7 are British. The others are European, except 1.8 which I think is American.

I think section 2 has a Baltic theme. (This is as far as I've gone in detail.)

Section 8 appears to be science (perhaps nature), section 12 medicine.

There are plenty of questions on events or people in Europe-but-not-Britain, but I'd struggle to call them "general" knowledge. Specialist knowledge on an extremely wide range of topics, perhaps.

I got a handful. (At least, there are a handful of answers I have >85% confidence of being correct.) For an American, that feels like a not-terrible unseen result.

My score is 0.

We’ll give you a “D” anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com