Introducing my new favorite way to procrastinate on the Internet!
http://www.sporcle.com/ is addicting and…educational? Yes. Unlike my old favorite- The Impossible Quiz – which was maddeningly pointless, Sporcle features a plethora of useful/interesting quizzes on…well…everything. (As an aside, there is a newer Impossible Quiz that I’ve never tried. It’s cleverly named The Impossible Quiz 2. I might have to check it out.)
Want pop culture? Sporcle’s got movie taglines, songs by bands with colors in the name, professional sports teams, and so on.
Want geography? Got it! List all the countries on a given continent, or all the countries that start with “A,” or all of the states or capitals, or heck, there’s even one for all the countries in the world.
US Presidents? Got it. Books of the Bible? Absolutely. Identifying corporate logos? You betcha. Or list the top 100 most commonly used words in the English language.
I could list quiz categories til the end of eternity, but you get the picture. Just go to the site. But *BEWARE* you will spend way more time taking quizzes than you should. You will forget to eat, forget to sleep, and I guarantee you will forget to study for midterms.
All of the quizzes are timed, but slackers are able to click “give up” prior to time running out. Once you give up or run out of time, the correct answers are displayed, so you can check them out and play again. It’s almost guilt-free procrastination, because you’re actually learning (or relearning) things that you should probably know anyway.
If you get tired of Sporcle (though I personally can’t fathom how that’s possible), try freerice.com. This site is great for people who want to show off or sharpen their vocabularies while helping feed hungry people. Funded by advertisements along the bottom, freerice provides you a word with pronunciation and four possible definitions. You choose the definition. For every correct answer you give, freerice donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. As you get more right, your level increases and the words become more difficult. This one is really really guilt-free because you’re actually helping feed people while increasing your knowledge.
It’s kinda funny how Internet culture spreads. I learned about both Sporcle and freerice from Facebook. Michael introduced me to The Impossible Quiz freshman year. He probably found it on Digg or a similar site. He’s addicted to that stuff. I say that, but here I am at 3:30 AM, blogging about quiz sites for procrastination.
i’m kind of afraid to explore the mysterious realms of sporlce and freerice now…. but i do love the impossible quiz, i think i may have to give that another shot. I never actually beat it…
Sporcle and freerice are both so much more worthy of your time than the impossible quiz. If you’re gonna go down that road, you should check them out.
I could rarely ever get past the one on the impossible quiz where you have to clip off the toenails in like 5 seconds. Very hard to do on a laptop without a mouse. But I haven’t tried it in ages.
New favorite Sporcle quiz: name all of the songs off The Beatles’ studio albums in 20 minutes. Epic. I’ve gotten 135 out of 192…approximately 70 percent. I know them all (except Yellow Submarine, which is not the same as the Yellow Submarine album that I own), it’s just so hard to think of them all.