Britons are wrong about nearly everything. Are you? (Quiz)

[Darat]

And if the mail had a quiz where one of the questions was "what percentage of Muslims on (particular housing estate in Rochdale) have been convicted of sexually grooming young white girls" the unusually high answer would also be correct factually but the questions are still pandering to its readerships predudices. My point was that it is dishonest not that the answers aren't technically right.

How are any of the questions dishonest? They are asking people to answer a question that has an objective and verifiable factual answer.

 

[Nogbad]

The questions were carefully formulated to make Daily Mail readers look like angry right-wing jerks while allowing Guardian readers to feel smugly self-satisfied about their high scores.

You make that sound like a bad thing

 

[Primus]

How are any of the questions dishonest? They are asking people to answer a question that has an objective and verifiable factual answer.

I explained exactly why I think it's dishonest in a post you replied to. Post 37 I believe. By quoting figures saying that only 3% of people are single parents the quiz is trying to give the impression that it isn't the case that ~25% of children in the UK are in a single parent household.

 

[Information Analyst]

I explained exactly why I think it's dishonest in a post you replied to. Post 37 I believe. By quoting figures saying that only 3% of people are single parents the quiz is trying to give the impression that it isn't the case that ~25% of children in the UK are in a single parent household.

Although then we have to question why that is inherently an "issue."

 

[MikeG]

How are any of the questions dishonest? They are asking people to answer a question that has an objective and verifiable factual answer.

Generally I'd agree with this, except for the question about child poverty, which is so dependant on your definition of poverty.

If Britain suddenly had an enormous oil find, becoming as wealthy as say Qatar, and gave every single person in the country a million pounds per year, then we would still have exactly the same number of kids falling into the definition of child poverty as we do today. So, I fully accept that the underlying problem is very real, but the measure of it is frankly ludicrous.

It is also highly disrespectful of families all over the world who do have to live in genuine desperate poverty, but that is an issue for another thread.

Mike

 

[cullennz]

This might be a stupid question, but how do they know what % of welfare is taken fraudulently?

The whole concept of the question contradicts itself

 

[Primus]

Although then we have to question why that is inherently an "issue."

I never said it was. I said they were mangling the stats to misrepresent the actual situation. Personally I don't really care that much about single parents. It isn't something that keeps me up at night.

 

[Doghouse Reilly]

The point of the test as it is worded in the Guardian article is not to test the knowledge of the Guardian readership. I got 8/10 mainly by choosing the low answer in the moral outrage questions and the high answer in the lack of moral outrage questions. In fact the two I got wrong were because i deviated from this and tried to answer based on my own knowledge.

So yes, the stats are correct, but that wasn't the point.

This is how I scored 8/10 as a US citizen.

 

[Acleron]

This might be a stupid question, but how do they know what % of welfare is taken fraudulently?

The whole concept of the question contradicts itself

They could sample and investigate intensively, can't think of another way. It was a statistic I knew having recently checked it, along with 30% of MPs had been found fiddling their expenses.

 

[applecorped]

5/10



Wankers.

 

[angrysoba]

How are any of the questions dishonest? They are asking people to answer a question that has an objective and verifiable factual answer.

If the questions are written in ways that can be misleading then I think it is fair to call them dishonest.

In the write-up before the actual quiz, the writer says:

Think you can guess the percentage of households in the UK headed by single parents?

Yet the question morphs into:

What percentage of people in Britain are single parents?

As for this one:

Out of every £100 of the welfare budget, how much is claimed fraudulently?

it is part of the nature of fraud that it is not always detected.

Asylum applications are higher now than five years ago

Not quite sure what this means. It probably doesn't mean that immigration is lower. And, putting on my irate Daily Mail reader hat, I could say, "Yeah, but that's only cos you've already let 'em all in!"

Violent crime in the UK has risen over the past few years

Bit vague isn't it. It might be lower than a spike in, say, 2011 or whenever, but it doesn't mean that it is lower than the good old days of the 1950s when I could leave my front door unlocked and not have to worry about anyone pinching my computer.

What percentage of the British electorate voted in the last general election?

Not too bad but still lower than most elections in the 20th Century as far as I remember.

What percentage of children in Britain live in poverty?

Depends on how poverty is defined.

Levels of the hospital superbug MRSA have declined over the past few years

Again a bit vague. Are we talking about comparisons with major spike years or is it a long-term trend?

 

[acementhead]

I'm a Kiwi. I got 9/10 I expected to score much lower. Te one that I got wrong was number 7

 

[acementhead]

Primus #37

There's an old cliché in the aviation industry. People say, literally, "RTFQ". It does help to work out the right answer.

 

[Orphia Nay]

I'm a Kiwi. I got 9/10 I expected to score much lower. Te one that I got wrong was number 7

Same as me, an Aussie.

Primus #37

There's an old cliché in the aviation industry. People say, literally, "RTFQ". It does help to work out the right answer.

For posterity, the question is:

1. What percentage of people in Britain are single parents?

Not "what percentage of parents in Britain are single parents?"


I did have to think about that one for a minute (or less), but it didn't hurt.

 

[Skepticemea]

8/10. The tactic of taking the pov of a slathering, cross-burning, black-shirted, Staffie-owning, cab-driving, lager-drinking, misogynistic Sun-reader and then filling in the opposite answer seems to work pretty well.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

8/10 (ETA-Another Briton.)

 

[Dcdrac]

10/10 and all gut based hunches

 

[Jack by the hedge]

8/10 including getting the now traditional Q1 wrong. And that's even after reading the introduction about "can you guess what proportion of UK households are headed by a single parent" and thinking "do they mean households with children?".

 

[Primus]

Primus #37

There's an old cliché in the aviation industry. People say, literally, "RTFQ". It does help to work out the right answer.

Not as much as simply going for the most "right on" answer for all of them. I got that one right anyway.

 

[BTMO]

I got 10/10. But I saved a lot of time. I was only ever going to guess at the answers, so I guessed my score as well, without doing the test.

I win.