Experts In General Knowledge Questions
I have a friend who seems to be an expert about pretty much everything. Without studying very much at all, he always aces his tests. It is as if he studies smarter than everyone else. His real area of expertise, however, is general knowledge questions. I have taken many pub quizzes with him, and I’ve seen how it goes. Half the time, he blows away everything in the bar. If he does lose, he invariably loses to someone much older than him who has been answering general knowledge questions in trivia quizzes for years.
He knows it all, more or less. He does good at geography trivia, sports trivia, world history, politics, and current events. For someone who listens to classic music and rarely leaves his apartment, he certainly seems to know his way around pop culture. He can answer almost every popular culture question you can ask. I don’t know how he does it.
For some reason it seems that some people just have a mind like that. Some people seem to absorb nearly everything they ever hear and organize it for later repetition. Whether it is general knowledge questions, abstract philosophy, analytical mathematics, or what have you, they just suck it in. The drawback to having a mind like this is that sometimes it makes you less creative. My friend is definitely an example of this. He is extremely good at combining bits of things he knows together to come up with variations, but few of his ideas are ever genuinely new. It is as if he has so cluttered his mind with the accumulated wealth of human knowledge that he can’t make anything up anymore.