Pop Quiz, Hotshot...

“Are you smarter than a (Swedish) schoolkid?” One of the news sites posted a multiple-choice vocab test after the latest round of high-school proficiency exams.

Once we’re out of school, everyone seems to love a quiz. After the autumn round of Sweden's high-school exam (höstens högskoleprov), the news site Sydsvenskan excerpted twenty-questions from the exam’s vocabulary section, and posted them. (Link is below.)

Multiple-choice, and the idea is you get one word, then pick the related word or phrase from the list as your answer. It’s not timed but it is “live”: you can submit your answers and get back a score from the site.

Now, there was no way I was going to pass it without going to the dictionary. But I took a different approach for a first run at the quiz. I used the dictionary only to look up the given words, as needed. I then tried to pick an answer from each list. Most of those words I didn’t know either, but I broke them down or related them to words that I do know, to try to pick a reasonable answer.

I’ll use one question (#13) as an example:

I knew that ögonblick is “a blink of an eye” and that -igen makes this an adjective. (Think verkligen or egentligen.) So, “immediately,” more or less. I knew utan is “without” and while I didn’t know that djöjsmål was “delay,” I did know that that dröja is “to delay.” So “without delay somethingsomething” seemed close enough to “immediately” and that was the answer I chose.

Right or wrong on the other questions, it was a good exercise. Give it a shot:

https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2017-10-12/quiz-hur-bra-ar-du-pa-ord