And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘tis that I may not weep… (Byron)

Check out some of the social media video sites, and you’re sure to notice the plethora of quiz material.  There are geography, science, history, etc. quizzes and you can take them and see just how sharp you are in the respective studies.  They all are careful to use language so as not to make you feel stupid if you can’t answer the questions, and maybe that’s the way it should be, but I also believe that you don’t earn an ice cream cone for getting one question correct out of say, nine or ten.

These quizzes are fun and sometimes very hard to score high on – the sites tell you that you have an exceptionally high IQ if you get, for instance 5 out of ten, etc. so you can feel smug about how smart you are.  Wouldn’t want someone to finish the quiz and feel inferior to others because he/she didn’t do so well, now would we?

In that vein – i.e. of encouraging people to feel confident about their smarts, this is a very simple quiz that you should be able to complete with a high score.  Nine questions in all to test your observation skills (or lack thereof).  The quiz will be done using pictures.  The quizee will be required to look at a picture and find obvious things that are wrong or out of place.  Ready?

Ok, study the following photo and find three things out of sorts:

Answers:

1. The newspaper is printed in French, and the man is Latvian – although he does know some Spanish, he can’t read a word of French.
2. The guy doesn’t use contacts – he wears glasses and doesn’t have them on. He doesn’t even know he’s looking at a French paper – come on y’all!
3. He has an appointment for a job interview and he’s already late, but he just keeps sitting there grinning, oblivious to the time and gawking at that paper he can’t even read.
4. Bonus observation for extra points: He won’t get the job.

How did you do?  Most people breeze through that one, so if you didn’t get at least two of them, you might be feeling a bit embarrassed.  And you should. 

Maybe you can redeem yourself with the next one try and find at least three things amiss here:

Answers:

The watch he’s looking at should give this one away right off the bat.

1. He obviously forgot to change his watch over to daylight savings time, so his time is off by one hour.  It’s easy to see this because of the slightly puzzled look on his face, although he’s trying to hide his discombobulation.
2. Even a novice observer should be able to see that he is plainly a security guard for the meeting here, but since his watch is wrong, he’s changed into street clothes an hour early – he’s still on duty but wearing the wrong clothes.
3. The colors are all wrong on the map in the background – Alaska was supposed to be blue. The capital of Alaska should have been marked, but it wasn’t because no one there knew where, or even what it is.  You can tell this meeting was a disaster.

I felt like I should include some super easy ones like those first ones so some even of the less cognitively gifted could at least get a few right.  If you had a problem with any of them so far, don’t be too hard on yourself – there are more of us around who have issues than you might think.

Okay, one more for anyone out there who might be sufficiently challenged as to have missed any already.  See if you can find three things wrong in this picture:

Answers:

1. Even those who aren’t all that sharp can see that the picture was staged – the smell in the area is of cows, not donkeys at all.
2. He’s standing on the tail of a screaming farm cat.  Maybe that’s why he’s laughing.
3. His hysteria very well could be because this donkey’s owner voted a straight Republican slate in the last election.

Hope you enjoyed this simple little quiz.  How did you score?

1. If you got them all, congratulations, although it was very easy and you shouldn’t consider yourself a genius.
2. If you got 5 or more, you must have a blissful life.
3. If you got 4 or less, that donkey is laughing at you – I mean, with you.

Have a wonderful day!