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Posts Tagged ‘quiz’

Ol’ Man Levitt: The Answer to the Freakonomics Quiz

Earlier this week I posed a quiz to blog readers: what happened twice to me in the last few days that had never once happened to me in the first 45 years of my life.

Well, it turns out that the answers readers posted turned out to be a pretty interesting data for analysis.  At the time that my researcher Sara Kuse crunched the numbers, there were 280 guesses (some commenters guessed more than once, and we counted all their guesses) that fell into roughly 110 different categories. 

The most commonly made guesses were getting robbed or mugged, making a hole in one, getting recognized/asked for an autograph, winning a prize, losing something like a wallet being in a car accident, and being stung by a bee.  Over 30 percent of all the guesses were one of those items.  None of those would qualify, however, because they’ve all happened to me at least once before.  Getting robbed and a hole in one were two great guesses – both have happened to me exactly once in my life. 



Freakonomics Quiz: Twice Is Enough

Last week something that has never happened to me before in my life, occurred twice, independently, in two days.

What was it? First correct answer in the comments section gets Freakonomics swag.

Although that is a meager set of hints, I’ve found that no matter how hard the quiz, Freakonomics blog readers can answer just about any question within an hour. I’ll be curious to see what happens on this one.



What's Unique About "Kine"?

If you like words even a little bit, you should take advantage of Anu Garg‘s wordsmith.org. It is an idiosyncratic exploration of how language works; his “word a day” e-mail is particularly fun.

The “word a day” theme this week is “words with unusual arrangements of letters.” The first word in this series was “verisimilitude,” which Garg notes has perfectly alternating consonants and vowels. (Not bad, Anu, but my son’s name is even better, as it has perfect consonant-vowel symmetry while using only a single vowel: Solomon. An even longer example is Tunku Varadarajan‘s last name.)

“Verisimilitude” was followed by “syzygy” (“one could hyperpolysyllabically contrive a longer word having four Ys, but syzygy nicely lines up three of them organically in just six letters,” Garg notes) and “yob” (the rare word created by spelling a different word backward).

But today’s word is my favorite. It’s “kine.” Before you click this link, or look the word up elsewhere, try to guess what is unique about it. A slight hint: the answer is related to the topic of this post and, marginally, this one one too. The answer is below.