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Are You Fit To Vote?
The responsibility we regard as an entitlement
Casting your ballot in an election is one of the most important things you can do in your life. Your vote, along with the millions of votes cast by your fellow citizens, can determine the future of your nation and sometimes the future of the world. We’ve all been told that representative democracy is a wonderful thing and many people value their right to vote. Representative democracy, however, depends on voters being reasonably well informed and thoughtful about the choices they make. Otherwise it’s just a way to amplify individual ignorance and folly.
How reasonably well informed are you? How thoughtful? We all tend to believe we’re smarter and better-informed than we really are, which is why testing ourselves is the best way to calibrate more accurately. The following questions are mostly on general knowledge that frankly everyone in the West should know with a few simple tests of reasoning ability sprinkled in as well.
So how fit do you think you are to vote?
If you’re brave enough, let’s find out. The following 20 questions don’t require anything in the way of specialist knowledge. They are questions that anyone who believes in representative democracy ought to be able to answer with ease. You can check your answers against the correct answers given at the end of this article. Although pure chance (e.g. selecting answers at random) will return a result of 33% when averaged over thousands of people, your individual score may be over 50% because of the Gaussian distribution of probability. So if you can’t score at least 60% correct answers that suggests you’re insufficiently informed and thoughtful to be a competent voter.
Provide yourself with a way to record your answers and let’s see how you do!
1. David Ricardo is famous for: (i) Scoring the winning goal in the last seven minutes of the Champions League final between Barcelona and Real Madrid in 2017; (ii) Being the only driver for the Ferrari team never to win a single Formula One race; (iii) Developing the economic theory of comparative advantage
2. On 14th January 1994 the USA entered into a legally-binding agreement to defend by all means necessary the territorial integrity of which European…
