General Knowledge quizzes

General knowledge quizzes, in the pub-quiz sense of the phrase

General knowledge is a genre rather than a subject, and a good round has a particular shape: it moves, it does not dwell, and no single area of expertise carries you through it. Somebody who knows a great deal about one thing should not beat somebody who knows a little about everything — that is the whole point of the format.

These rounds range across geography, history, language, science, sport and the miscellaneous facts that do not belong anywhere else. Questions are spread deliberately so that a run of four in the same area does not happen, which is the most common failing of automatically assembled quizzes.

Difficulty is split into easy and medium. The easy rounds sit at the level of a friendly pub quiz where the point is that everyone can answer something. The medium rounds are closer to a serious one, where a team of four would expect to get most but not all of them and would argue about two.

There are also narrower rounds — world capitals, history, geography — for when you would rather concentrate on one area. Each quiz draws a random selection from a larger bank each time, so playing again gives a genuinely different set rather than the same questions reordered.

Questions