Culture
Are you smarter than a college football referee? Take the rules quiz they have to pass
How difficult is it to be a college football referee? Let’s find out how smart you are.
Officials are often the target of frustration for fans, especially after questionable or missed calls. But they aren’t noticed when they make the right call, which happens the vast majority of the time.
To give you a sense of the types of rulings officials have to know and deliver instantly, we’re letting you take an actual Ref Quiz.
Earlier this summer, I sat in on the Mountain West/Conference USA officiating clinic outside Dallas, led by former Big 12 referee Mike Defee, the coordinator of officials for both conferences. The clinic focused on standards, new rules, training tips and game logistics. It also included a multiple-choice quiz for the officials, featuring questions about various in-game situations. Other conferences hold similar clinics.
“The test is built to be a well-rounded test of the rule book to make sure they’ve spent time having a good working knowledge of it,” Defee said. “They’re required to pass it or they don’t get a schedule.”
A passing grade is 70 percent, and crew head referees are expected to score higher. All of the Mountain West and CUSA core officials passed it this year, Defee said, but a few developmental officials did not.
I myself was humbled with a 48 percent score when I took the quiz at the clinic, so you won’t see me on the field. The original quiz was 27 questions, but we’ve narrowed it down to 15. We’ve also clarified some language to make the game situations easier to understand. Let’s see if you’re smart enough to be a college football official.
(Note: Readers who are using our app on an Android device may need to use two fingers to scroll through the quiz. Still unable to get the survey? Try this direct link.)
(Photo: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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