… or should be able to just figure out off the top of your head. A great question to think about is this: What should those basic pieces of background knowledge be?

This week’s Challenge might not be the ultimate Challenge, but it IS a test of things I think everyone should know, or more importantly, to be able to reason about quickly and easily.

The Pre-Challenge:

To get things going, here’s a LINK to a Pre-Challenge test. If you would, please take this BEFORE you work on the Challenges below. (You won’t get a grade–this is just for us to get a sense of what people know as part of their background knowledge.) I’ll report back next week with the (anonymized!) results.

— pause while you go off to do the quiz —

Now that you’re back from the Pre-Challenge test, let’s restate the Challenge questions. You can now go ahead and do your SearchResearch for the Challenges that you didn’t know off the top of your head…

1. Based on what you know about the Earth and its movement around the Sun, approximately how far does the Earth travel around the Sun in one day? (In miles or kilometers.)

For extra credit: About what angle does it traverse? (In degrees.) You should be able to figure the angle without looking up anything!

2. At home I have a Wifi system that’s running at 10 Mbps in the upload direction. Ignoring all other sources of delays, how long should it take for me to upload a 2 Gigabyte file?

3. Consider these former colonial countries: Brazil, Canada, Mexico. Which country got its independence first? Which was second? Which was third?

4. Could George Washington (the first President of the United States, and a great music lover) have heard the music of Joseph Haydn?

With a quick search you can answer these questions fairly easily. The Challenge for this week is how much do you know without Google? In my answer next week, I’ll explain the rationale behind each of these questions, and why I believe that part of what makes a SearchResearcher great is that you already have a big background base of knowledge.

I’m looking forward to your answers!

Search on!