Online Quizzes and Me by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

I like to scroll through Pinterest for ideas, but occasionally I come across some quiz or other. Now, these sometimes don’t catch my interest, mostly because they have to do with some movie or TV series I don’t watch, but they do have a few trivia quizzes with attention-catching headlines, “No one gets this without cheating,” or, “You have to have an IQ over 150 to pass this!”

Okay, I’ll bite. It is usually quite fun. (I’ve been known to laugh at the results.)

I’ve taken quizzes on history, vocabulary, grammar, and even medical knowledge (just for fun).

I, of course, aced the vocabulary and grammar quizzes, but I took them to see what the quiz would say about my performance. Generally speaking, they insist I must have a Ph.D. in the subject. College drop-out here.

But that isn’t even as funny as the one I took which insisted I would have to be an RN to pass. Really? It was so easy; I didn’t have to dig into my long-ago memory of quizzing my stepmom for her RN exams. Every single question on there I either learned from shows like Emergency and MASH or just listening to my stepmom. There was nothing tricky or involved, it was just trivia. I aced it, and the quiz the makers decided I must be a doctor. Hardly.

Another fun one for me is history quizzes or American history quizzes.

For those of you that don’t know, my husband was a history buff. After so many years of living with him, I picked up on a few things. Again, they were pure trivia and multiple choice, so not hard at all, especially when most of the time I could eliminate two of the three choices because those two events happened in my lifetime! My opinion is, that you’d have to be randomly picking any answer without reading to flunk this quiz.

But then, I can say the same for those vocabulary ones. You only have three to four choices, and believe me, it was easy to eliminate all but one of the few I wasn’t sure of.

And in everyone, I’m supposedly a master of the English language and love to read the dictionary. Folks, the lexicologist in my life would be the big sister Konnie and I often refer to as Dictionary. I never cracked a dictionary open until I was in eighth grade, and I only did that to prove I was right, and never to do my vocabulary classwork. Never needed it.

But the really laughable one which claimed you had to have an IQ over 150 to pass. Really? Then make the quiz harder. My IQ isn’t that high (I know, I’ve been tested) and I aced your simple trivia quiz.

But then I’ve gotten some interesting outcomes on the personality or heritage quizzes, like the one which insisted that I must be of Asian decent because of my focus on family. Family comes first with some Christian faiths; you know like Catholics and well, our Church. You don’t have to be Asian to value family.

I took one quiz that said, “no one born in the US can answer these tough questions.” Okay, that one would be considered tough by anyone who didn’t live for decades with a historian and hadn’t studied pre-law in college. That isn’t me though.

For your information, the quiz is the one people have to take to become naturized citizens. And honestly, there are many native citizens who don’t know, or ignore, some of this stuff, but, again, I’m not one of them!

Though the one I took the other day was all about common phrases from other countries. Out of curiosity, I took it.

Fun quiz. Most of these common phrases were either Latin or a language based on Latin. Folks, I took French in college. Not fluent but I can at least introduce myself in the language and ask if they speak English. I also took a course on studying the root, or history, of words. Which means learning some Latin. Ergo, any language based on Latin I can usually figure out.

Of the few that didn’t fall into that category was one from Japan, which I learned eons ago from a fellow lady at church whose family had just returned to the states after years of her husband being stationed in Japan.

The other one has been used in at least one movie, enough so I’ve heard it in that movie’s ads. And, according to the quiz makers, I must be multilingual. LOL!

A semester each of sign language and studying the roots of words, plus two semesters of French, all decades ago make me fluent in only my Native tongue, period.

Happy writing everyone!