Which Weighs More Game
An ant or a coin? A horse or a cow? Tap the heavier one.
About Which Weighs More?
Which Weighs More? shows two emoji, for instance a brick and a smartphone, or a lion and a bear, and asks which of the two is heavier. The pool has 34 things from a 3 milligram ant to a 120 tonne blue whale. You use typical adult weights: for animals, the average of a grown specimen.
Early rounds compare things whose weights differ by at least a factor of four, which is easy when you know a little about the world. In later rounds the gap is as small as 23 percent, which makes you think about whether a cow is heavier than a horse or a giant tortoise heavier than a lion.
How to play
- Look at the two pictures and think of the typical weight of each.
- Tap the heavier one, or press 1 or 2 on a keyboard.
- The note after your answer gives both weights in grams, kilograms or tonnes.
- Pairs with only a small difference in weight appear on higher levels.
Two things are shown as emoji. Tap the one that is heavier. Typical adult animals and everyday objects are used.
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 ratio between the two weights is at least 4 on level 1 and at least 1.23 on level 10, and at most about 130,000 on level 1 and about 64 on level 10. The time limit is 8 seconds on level 1 and 6 seconds on level 10.
The weights are typical rounded values for adults of the species or standard objects, for example 4.5 kg for a house cat, 30 kg for a Labrador, 70 kg for an adult human, 600 kg for a dairy cow and 5 tonnes for an African elephant. Two things that are almost equal in weight never appear together.
What it trains
The game trains your sense of scale in the real world. A sense of how heavy things are is part of everyday life: lifting, carrying, shipping and cooking all use it.
It also surprises. Many people place an eagle too close to a chicken or underestimate how heavy a horse is. Seeing the real values is a good way to calibrate.
Tips for a higher score
- Learn anchors: a mouse weighs 20 g, a cat 4.5 kg, an adult human 70 kg, a car 1.4 tonnes and an elephant 5 tonnes.
- Think in groups: insects are in grams or less, small pets in grams to a few kilos, large mammals in hundreds of kilos, whales in tens of tonnes.
- Do not confuse size and weight. A watermelon is lighter than a bicycle, and a brick is heavier than a laptop.
- For big animals, think about their volume. A body twice as long in every direction weighs about eight times as much.
- If you are not sure, choose the one that is larger in all three directions.
The idea behind it
Body mass changes with the cube of length, so doubling all the dimensions of an animal multiplies its weight by eight. That relation, together with the fact that bones and muscles must carry the weight, shapes the animal kingdom. Max Kleiber found in 1932 that the metabolic rate of mammals grows with their mass raised to the power of about three quarters.
A related effect in human perception is the size-weight illusion, described by Augustin Charpentier in 1891. When two objects have the same weight, the smaller one feels heavier. It is a reminder that our intuitions for weight rely on expectations based on size.
Frequently asked questions
Which weights are used for animals?
Typical weights of adults, rounded. For species with large differences between males and females, the game uses a typical male value.
Why is the airliner listed as empty?
A loaded aircraft is a lot heavier. The game uses a typical empty weight of about 42 tonnes for a short-haul airliner.
Which game is related?
Weight in the Physical category asks you to estimate the weight of an object in kilograms.
Related games
Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.