Pop Quiz, Hot Shot

Another part of the National Geographic's homepage that endears me to the website is the pop quiz window; this is a, hitherto undiscovered by me, gem of interactivity available free of charge. Essentially what it does is fire a barrage of multiple choice questions at the willing participant and then submit their answers to be compared to other, better people's results - as is the case with myself who got a paltry 11 correct out of 25.

 It is, of course, all in good fun. The trivia is varied and fascinating, ranging from such subjects as South Africa's seal colonies to the Earth weight of an astronaut's spacesuit, and a new quiz is available every few weeks. The beauty this quiz featuring on Nat Geo's website is that each answer, whether correct or humiliatingly wrong, leads to a hyperlink that will whisk you away to a series of articles, videos and pictures that will tell you all about the subject - so that you will never again be subjected to the humiliation of not knowing that the way to tell the difference between a wasp and a bee is to examine the thickness of their waists.

  So it's yet more interactivity on the part of the Nat Geo website. The promise of beautiful pictures and silken prose draw the browser to the website, but it is the clever little touches such as this quiz that kept me glued to the site and had me exploring (without even noticing it) the vast depths of information it has to offer.