World Knowledge Games
General sense of the world: sizes, distances, populations and rankings.
About this category
Some intuition comes from experience with the physical world, and some from what you have picked up about the wider one: how tall the tallest tower is, how far Sydney lies from London, which country has more people. The five games in this category test and extend that general sense of scale.
Higher or Lower and Sort Order compare mountains, buildings, animals, rivers, historic dates and countries. Geo Distance asks for the distance between two cities, Geo Population compares the number of inhabitants and Which Weighs More? puts an ant next to a whale.
All figures are rounded values from standard reference works, and pairs that are too close to call are never used.
The 5 World games
Why train this?
A sense of scale helps with news, travel and everyday decisions, and it is built from small facts that you can check. Research on estimation shows that we anchor on numbers we have just seen, and that our mental maps of the world are distorted by the way we learned them. Playing with real values gives you a chance to correct these distortions.
The questions are chosen so that a good guess is possible even when you do not know the exact figure. If you can place the new item on a ladder of things that you do know, you will usually get the direction right.
How to improve
- Build ladders of anchors: a few heights, a few distances, a few populations that you know by heart.
- Compare, don't recall. You rarely need an exact number, only whether one is bigger than the other.
- Use ratios. Is it about twice as big, ten times, a hundred times?
- Check the units. Kilometres and metres, tonnes and kilograms are easy to mix up.
- Read the note after each round. A single surprising fact is easier to remember than a long list.
- The tables are the same in every language, so what you learn here also holds when you play in another language.