On Sunday, I recorded "Are you smarter than a ten-year-old". I was intensely curious about whether they had managed to find really dumb people to ask the questions, whether they had found the five smartest ten-year-olds in the country, or whether they were just asking really specialised questions.
Well, it turned out it wasn't that interesting. A fairly standard quiz show, in the conversational mold of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", with questions that were mostly pretty simple. (I must confess that the spelling question where the word was 'supersede' gave me pause, mostly out of doubt about whether the spelling is different in American English than in the Queen's English. Also, I didn't know how many of Henry VIII's wives were beheaded, so that's a fair cop.)
Of slightly more concern, though, was this question:
What is: 5 + 3 x 0 ?
For some bizarre reason, the contestant decided the answer was 15. But that's not what bothered me. What bothered me is that the answer given was 0. Apparently, the quiz-masters of the show aren't quite as smart as might be hoped.
(In case you don't see it: precedence rules state that the first thing that you do is the multiplication, so it becomes "What is 5 + 0 ?", which is 5.)
Dear me. I didn't expect the feel dumber after watching it.
3 comments:
I know the rules are BODMAS (Brackets, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction), can never remember what O stands for!! That is quite shocking, but I can understand why someone might think it is 0, but shocking that the judges didnt check their answer! So was it good then?
We only did BODMAS for all of fifteen minutes in school, before moving on to BEDMAS (Brackets, Exponent, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction).
I am not a fan of the show, no. I haven't watched it since. I'm not really interested in 'faux-tension' gameshows which are predicated on the presented inserting dramatic pauses into the narrative to pretend things are more exciting than they actually are (as started in "Who Wants to be a Millionairre", carried on in "Deal or No Deal", and continued here).
Actually, I think the best game shows may well be puzzle-based ones, where the audience can play along at home. Shows like AYSTATYO are not good because the questions are too easy; shows like Mastermind don't work since you probably don't have the same specialist subject as the contestant. So, really what's needed is something like "The Krypton Factor", only with word, number or logic puzzles, that test reasoning without requiring specialist knowledge.
Of course, such things are actually hard to create, so I think we'll instead have to tolerate another ten years of Chris saying, "You did have four thousand pounds..."
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Wait for it... (Isn't this tense?)
Wait for it...
"We'll be right back after this short break!"
Did you win the £4k then?
The suspense is killing me!
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