[quote name=\'whoserman\' date=\'Dec 11 2005, 03:15 AM\']The only problem is, Matt, that if you're like me, (i.e. not a football buff,) you'll look at those four names and think, "Who the hell are these guys?"[/quote]
But that's true of absolutely any question anybody writes. If it's in a field you don't know, it's going to look like it's in a foreign language. Super Bowl quarterbacks is fair game with a million dollars on the line. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I only recognized the names of three of the quarterbacks.)
The hardest thing to do when you're writing questions is to remove your own personal biases when it comes to judging their difficulty. That's why we noticed that, as an entire writing staff, the original Millionaire badly misjudged the difficulty of their science questions (they were too easy) and their literature questions (usually too hard).
Slightly OT: Because of my visibility in town, I'm often requested on the spot to ask somebody a trivia question. If there's a small group, my absolute favorite is, "What's the last word of the Pledge of Allegiance?" The reason being it's the closest thing I've found to a universal question that everybody knows where the answer doesn't immediately spring to mind. I've had first graders beat thirtysomethigs to the right answer.
