alt Hacker NewsIn addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error.
(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)
I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?
Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:
> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.
> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:
> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words
> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.
> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)
Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.
They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.
Cute, but wrong on many counts.
Replies
A lot are also just guessable because 3 out of the 4 definitions are obvious nonsense. I'd rather have a "I don't know this word" button than just pick the one that's obviously correct out of the 4, if the goal is to get a real estimate.
I agree with the others
But the choice of "advanced words" seems a bit odd. Obscure, isnt that obscure.
Sure there are some speciality words, but most of these words are just the stuff you're gonna hear on radio4 in normal conversation
Confusingly I got three wrong but got the same vocab estimate.
I think I got 80 correct and got 57k.
What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100
As an aside, I am also an avid reader, always have been, 790 on the !math part of the SAT back in the very early 2000s.
I attribute most of my success in life to reading early and often. Bartending in college rounded out the social skills (for me) but those two skills have carried me further than I anticipated, coming from a poor background.
Have you found the same to be true?
Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours.
As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)