The Extreme Survival Quiz is very nicely formatted, so I thought you might enjoy playing with it while I work on Tangled Bank. My score? 15/17. According to this quiz, this means I have what it takes to be an extreme survivor, and I am allowed to wear an "I Will Survive" Gloria Gaynor t-shirt in good faith. My wrong guesses and accompanying comments are below the fold. How did you do? I did really well with the animal attack (not surprisingly) and the man-made disasters questions. Even though I got all the shark questions correct, for example, I wonder, what would I really do if I was being attacked by a shark? Sure, I know what to do when I am sitting in front of my computer but honestly, I'd be so danged scared in the real situation that I wonder what I'd really do. If I did manage to stare down the shark, I think it would only be because I'd be too mortified, too frozen, to do anything besides watch the shark eat my arm off. A sort of crunchy snack .. Anyway, I missed two questions (obviously). I missed one tornado question -- seriously, are there that many ditches in the Midwest?? Anyway, I voted for hiding under a freeway overpass, although I realize that was a dumb choice (why didn't they list "none of the above" as an option? I thought all the answers to that question were just really bad). I also decided (erroneously) to ration my water if I was dying in a desert, not realizing that people have been found dead with water in their canteens. So, I passed. Depending upon the disaster I face.
- Log in to post comments
I don't know shit about getting attacked by animals. I only got the snakebite question right. I did pretty well on the rest of the quiz, though.
Ouch. I only got 11 right. As a midwesterner, I aced the tornado questions. But I got almost all the animal questions wrong. The wording was a little weird. I knew to avert the eyes when being threatened by a dog, but the answer just said to stand still without mentioning averting your eyes... So I think I should get like 13 or 14 if technicalities count! :)
I got 7 out of 17. I got all the crime/terrorism and most man-made-disaster questions right; I did horribly with animal attacks and tornadoes.
Poorly worded, and the "correct" answers sometimes appeared to assume facts or words that were not in the questions. But I still scored 15.
I got 13/17 in this ineptly-constructed quiz and then raised my score to 17/17 after I attacked the quiz author and he curled into a ball.
Yes, there are that many ditches in the Midwest. The place is FLAT. You have to get the water to drain off the roads somehow, so roads are usually ditched.
-- Kevin, who's had a truck winched out of a ditch in a Midwestern winter more than once.
I got 10/17. I'm barely alive and maimed for life.
I got an 11 . . . but I, too, got all the tornado questions right. I grew up in Omaha, and you're trained from a young age to respond correctly. The first thing I ever learned was to go to the basement bathroom and hide in a shower stall or bathtub, and ditches are key outside. And like Kevin said, there are ditches *everywhere* in the midwest.
End answer: I survived . . . sort of.
One that really bugged me was #16, which said that if your airplane crashes in the water, you should get away because of the massive suction from the fuselage sinking. Mythbusters pretty much showed that to be bunk.
14 out of 17. Some of the questions are worded in a tricky way, but it's still an informative test to take.
i worry more about the flaming inferno scenario from all the jet fuel. but i always thought the fuselage would drag surface objects down, at least a little way, when it sank, it makes intuitive sense .. so all those WWII and Titanic movies were wrong?? quel horror!
i always wonder what to do when my elevator is crashing to earth from 47 stories up? why wasn't that included as a question or two?? oh, i would have gotten the answer wrong, no doubt. but still ..
and one thing that i can't understand about this quiz; why no earthquake survival questions? i know i would have done well with those, since i grew up in the shadow of "the big one", and have successfully survived three (four?) 6+ earthquakes -- one in a foreign country, too!
Good question about earthquakes... they'd have probably pulled up my average, not so much because I've ever lived in earthquake-prone areas (I haven't) as because for some reason I got earthquake survival tips drilled into my head in school.
Another (former) midwesterner here; I had no clue what to do about sharks, but the tornadoes and dog attacks were no problem. I just don't worry about shark attacks at all. I don't think I've ever seriously considered the possibility. I'm going to start worrying now, though. I mean, what if my plane crashes in shark-infested water?
I did pretty well otherwise, though I felt that some of the response choices were sort of ambiguous, and the "right" answers sometimes included one of the incorrect responses as a first step, (for example, I think it was the one about stampeding mobs in airplanes where the correct choice began with the statement "if you can't crawl under the seat," -- which was one of the other choices -- then curl up in a fetal position and try to preserve room to breathe (or something to that effect), which sort of implies that crawling under the seat would have been a good choice too -- maybe there's more than one correct response for some of the questions?).