Where can I find number estimation quiz questions?

December 24, 2012 10:58 AM

I want to do a quiz that encourages having a guess above getting the exact right answer. What I'm looking for is a collection of questions and answers where the answer is some estimable number.

Here are some examples:

What is the population of Indonesia?
What is the distance between the earth and the moon?
What is the wavelength of red light?
What is the length of the Amazon river?

Is there a board game that contains questions kindof like that?

Historical "in what year" type questions would do too. I'm not looking for maths problems though.

Is there a collection online somewhere?

My Googling turned up this page, which is about right, but I need more than 10 questions. I could come up with 10 myself, but I want a few hundred and I'd find that pretty difficult.

I realise that any simple number answer to these sorts of questions is probably a gross simplification, but simplifications is what I'm looking for.

posted by PJMcPrettypants to sports, hobbies, & recreation (7 answers total)

Is there a board game that contains questions kindof like that?

Yes, you're describing Wits and Wagers.
posted by valeries at 11:02 AM on December 24, 2012 [8 favorites]

A general name for this type of thing is Fermi problems, so you might have some good luck searching on that term. For instance, here's the U Maryland physics department's big list.
posted by dorque at 11:11 AM on December 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wits and Wagers. Also a kid-friendly version- Wits and Wagers Family.
posted by carterk at 11:28 AM on December 24, 2012

A board game that is similar for non-numerical things is Wise and Otherwise.

You hear part of a proverb/cultural saying and try to guess the rest.
posted by itesser at 12:07 PM on December 24, 2012

Thirding Wits & Wagers. Had it in mind instantly before even look at comments, and of course not at all surprised to see it recommended here. It's almost exactly what you want. It also scales wonderfully to very large groups.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 12:30 PM on December 24, 2012

Wits and Wagers seems to be almost exactly right. The only thing is that I'm in the UK and apparently many of the questions are very US-centric.

Apparently there was a UK version called Gambit 7 but I can't find it in stock anywhere. It isn't on the publisher's site either so I suppose it's been discontinued.

I might just have to order Wits and Wagers from America and take out any questions that are too US specific to be understood.
posted by PJMcPrettypants at 3:53 PM on December 24, 2012

Only 20 questions on the BBC's boxing day quiz, but that's about as UK-centric as you get.

Timeline (also comes in other flavors--inventions, musical instruments, etc.) is like this only for time. You put down cards in chronological order so you only need to know before/after, but when there are a lot of cards down it can get tricky.
posted by anaelith at 12:35 PM on December 26, 2012