241–250 of 575 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also doesn't get hard enough Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?
I thought that one was pretty well known. But then, I can also rattle off Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at will.
say what you like about antidisestablishmentarianism; at least it's an ethos
It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics. I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.
Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored. I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust s…
It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
It's hilarious that most of these words are French
Depends is bratwurst a German word or an English one? You will hard pressed to find an American that doesn’t know thr word and what it means. You can buy them at just about any grocery store and they are a staple of many restaurants. At some point the word becomes both. Sourced from its mother language and maybe even still meaning the same thing in both, but no less an English word than any other at this point.
(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)
I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?
Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:
> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.
> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:
> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words
> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.
> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)
Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.
They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.
Cute, but wrong on many counts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction. Zenzizenzizenzic for example.
I used to do this in school tests too.