Born in the UK

Quizzes are all about what you know.  No one person has the sum of human knowledge at his or her disposal (well, they do these days, pretty much, if they've got access to the Internet; but you know what I mean.) 

What's more, the world is a big place, and we all know more about our own local culture than we do about anybody else's.  That's just the way it is (as Bruce Hornsby once said ...)

If you went to a quiz in Brazil, say, you'd probably get a few questions on world geography, world history, and world culture.  But I expect you'd also hear a lot of questions about Brazil, which anyone who wasn't from Brazil would stand very little chance of answering correctly.

But, then again ... do they have pub quizzes in Brazil?  I've never been there, but I somehow suspect that they don't.

Marcus Berkmann, in Brain Men: a Passion to Compete (see my Quiz Books page) describes the quiz culture as "a British thing".  He describes the reaction of some American visitors that he took to a pub quiz: "They couldn't believe their eyes."

Other countries, not least the USA, do of course have quizzes on TV; indeed Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, for one, was pretty much a worldwide phenomenon.  So maybe what's unique to the UK is the idea of ordinary people taking part in quizzes in their local bars, on a regular basis.

Either way, I do expect any interest that my collection might attract to be mainly from the UK.  Which is just as well - because I think that it's in the UK that it'll be of most use.

Unless you had a huge international panel of contributors (as does Wikipedia, for example, and in a very different way Encyclopaedia Britannica) you could never come up with a collection of quiz questions that would be equally relevant in all parts of the world.  And even if you did, each individual reader would only be interested in a small subset of the content.

If you've read my About Me page, you'll know that I live in the North West of England. I was born in England, I've lived in the UK all my life, and I've done all my quizzing in the UK.  So this website reflects what people in the UK know, and the range of subjects that get asked in UK quizzes.  It has, I think, a good selection of world geography, world history, and world culture; the aforementioned Brazil, for example, gets a namecheck on over 60 different pages, and its capital Rio de Janeiro on a further 12 - not all of them, by any means, about football or the 2016 Olympics.

But a lot of the content will be of little or no interest to anyone outside the UK.  Even the international content is no doubt biased more than slightly towards the English-speaking world, and Western Europe to a lesser extent.

I make no apology for this. At the end of the day, I do this for my own amusement really; and in any case I can only write up the stuff I hear about. I do hope that some people from outside the UK will find my collection interesting, and even helpful; but my ambition doesn't stretch to a "worldwide edition".

If, however, you're interested in putting together a version that would be more relevant to your part of the world, I would love to hear from you!

© Haydn Thompson 2016