In 2019, I played in the World Quizzing Championship for the sixth time–and won the Boulder, Colorado subregional for the sixth time. Yay me. 😃
Just show up at a location near you at the appointed time. You get 1 hour to answer 120 questions, divided into 4 general categories. Then you switch papers with someone and grade them. After a short break, you get another hour to answer another 120 questions in 4 other categories. Thus, a perfect score is 240. My general goal is to score more than half, which I have done 5 of the 6 years.
It’s a lot of fun every year to see what you know–and usually a little embarrassing to see how much you don’t know, how much you do/should know/have heard of but can’t remember, and how many more you would get right if you read every word in the question very carefully 😠
Yet, my WQC score of 110 was 221st out of more than 2,600 people, so I still did really well. 💪 The bad news is, there’s a lot of work needed to get higher than that. Looking at recent questions, I do well on physical science, chess and Norse myth but still need to learn animals, international sports, and world geography–among other things.
On the good side, in one of those 6 years, I took the same test as Mark Labbett, famous now from the TV series “The Chase.” He and I scored dead-even in 6 of the 8 categories; he knew more about sports and entertainment than I did. So maybe I can try “The Chase” someday and run into him in person.