Custom Search

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Pew News IQ Quiz

Take the Pew Research quiz before reading the post.


Politically the news runs a 24 hr cycle while the public usually takes time to sleep, the news never does. Pew Research has a political IQ quiz to see how well you, the average American citizen, keeps up with the news.

I blog about politics, so the questions were easy enough for this message:

Here's Your Score: You correctly answered 12 of the 12 possible questions along with approximately 2% of the public. You did better than 98% of the general public.


That surprised me. Not that I answered them correctly, I have written about almost all the issues that the quiz dealt with, had I not known the answers, I would have thought I needed to stop writing totally.

What about people who do not blog, how do they do on the quiz?

(Click to enlarge)


Here is another little tidbit which I found interesting.

Out of 12 different areas of knowledge, in the case of 10 of them, more Republicans knew about the issue than Democrats. In one area Democrats and Republicans were tied. Only in one specific area did Democrats lead in knowledge.

(Click to enlarge)


In the current knowledge test, just 2% of the public answered all questions correctly (12 out of 12) while 6% failed to get a single question right. Fewer than half (44%) answered at least half the questions correctly.

Overall, Americans ages 50 and older answered an average of 5.8 questions correctly, while those younger than age 30 answered an average of just four questions. College graduates got the highest scores among all of the groups analyzed (7.1 correct answers), while those with some college education averaged 5.3 correct answers and those with a high school education or less got 4.2 right.

Republicans and independents each averaged 5.7 correct answers, compared with five correct among Democrats. Men correctly answered an average of 5.9 of the 12 items; women answered an average of 4.7.


What was your score? Tell us in the comments.