Higher or Lower Facts Game

About Higher or Lower

Higher or Lower gives you one fixed point and asks about another. For example: 'Is Shanghai Tower taller or shorter than Space Needle (184 m)?' You see the value of the first item and have to decide whether the second one is above or below it. You never have to give a number, only a direction, so your general knowledge counts as much as your calculation.

Five kinds of questions come up: heights of mountains, heights of famous buildings, top speeds of animals, lengths of rivers and the dates of historical events. On the first levels only mountains, buildings, animals and events appear, and the two values are far apart, up to three times as much. By level 10 they differ by as little as a quarter, and event dates may be ten years apart.

How to play

1. Read the question and look at the value of the first item.
2. Think about whether the second item is taller, longer, faster or later. Use what you know and compare with other things you know.
3. Tap the answer button, or press 1 or 2 on a keyboard.
4. After your answer the note shows the real value of the second item.

One item is shown with its value. Decide whether a second item has a higher or lower value than the first. Heights, lengths, speeds and years all come up.

How scoring works

A right answer scores 100 and a wrong one 0, and in endless mode a right answer counts as a passed round. The difficulty depends on the gap between the two values: a ratio of about 3.2 on level 1 and about 1.23 on level 10. For dates, the gap is at least 55 years on level 1 and 8 years on level 10.

The tables hold 20 mountains, 18 buildings, 19 animals, 24 rivers and 20 events, all with rounded, well-known figures. Rivers appear from level 3. The time limit is 10 seconds on level 1 and 8 seconds on level 10.

What it trains

The game trains your sense of scale in the real world: how tall things are, how fast animals move, how long rivers run and when events took place. This is background knowledge that helps you to understand news, geography and history.

It also trains comparison against a reference. Even without knowing the exact value of the second item, you can often place it relative to other things you know, which is the basis of good estimation.

Tips for a higher score

• Build a ladder in your head: Everest at 8,849 m, Mont Blanc at 4,806 m, Mount Fuji at 3,776 m, Ben Nevis at 1,345 m. Place the new item on the ladder.
• For animals, think about what it can do: a cheetah catches an antelope, so it is faster than a lion, which is faster than a house cat.
• For dates, link the event to something nearby that you know. The telephone, the light bulb and the Eiffel Tower all come from the 1870s and 1880s.
• Be careful with rivers: the length depends on how you measure, but the game only uses pairs that are clearly different.
• If you do not know, think of a rough guess for the second value and compare it with the first. It beats a coin flip.

The idea behind it

Estimating a quantity relative to a reference is the subject of a famous study by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, published in 1974. In one experiment, people first saw a random number from a wheel of fortune and were then asked whether the percentage of African countries in the United Nations was higher or lower than that number. Their later estimates were pulled toward the random number. This is called anchoring.

The game shows the anchor on purpose, as a visible value, so that you can practise using it without being misled by it: ask yourself how far the new item really is from the anchor, instead of how close it is.

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Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.