FAQ: About the Martial Arts Quiz

What quiz?
answer
Can I pass on a question that I'm not sure about?
answer
What happens if I run out of time before answering all the questions?
answer
Hey, I got a negative score! How are the scores calculated?
answer
Why must I choose an art before I begin?
answer
What are the questions about?
answer
If I choose "Thai Boxing" and then deliberately get all the answers wrong, doesn't that make Thai boxers look dumb?
answer
My answer was better than yours, but the quiz said I was wrong! Will you fix it?
answer

What quiz?

The Fudebakudo MAQ or Martial Arts Quiz.

The MAQ asks a range of questions on topics directly and indirectly related to the martial arts. Of course you can take it just for fun, but we track the results to determine which martial artists are the smartest.

Can I pass on a question that I'm not sure about?

Yes. If you pass on a question, you will score no points for that question. This way you can avoid losing points if you're wrong... but of course you won't gain any points either.

Remember, though, that you cannot go back and answer questions in anything other than the order in which they come at you. You can't go back and try to answer a question that you had previously passed on.

(By the way, when we first released the quiz there was no "pass" option. We've added it because some people complained the quiz really was too harsh without it.)

What happens if I run out of time before answering all the questions?

If you run out of time before you've finished the quiz, then all the questions you didn't get around to answering are marked wrong. Are we tough or what?

Hey, I got a negative score! How are the scores calculated?

There are three levels of question, and you'll get asked some of each in the quiz.

level	quantity in quiz	scores
level	quantity in quiz	right	wrong
white belt	4 questions	+1	−2
brown belt	7 questions	+2	−1
black belt	4 questions	+3	0

Of course, this means that the white belt questions are the easiest ones, and the black belt questions are typically the hardest or most precise. We don't ask you many white belt questions because we know you like to be challenged, and nobody likes a sparring partner who falls over too easily.

Why must I choose an art before I begin?

We record the best recent results of the quiz along with the art that you practice so we can declare which martial artists are the smartest.

The composition of the quiz depends on the art you choose. We don't think you're so smart if you only know a lot about your own art. So, for example, if your declared art is judo, your quiz will contain questions on a wide range of martial arts but you won't be asked many judo questions.

What are the questions about?

Generally the questions concern the kind of things that a really smart martial artist should know. The categories in the quiz include the following. Around half of the questions in your quiz will be from the Martial Arts category.

Entertainment & Literature
First Aid & Anatomy
General Warfare
Geography
Martial Arts
Oriental History & Culture

If I choose "Thai Boxing" and then deliberately get all the answers wrong, doesn't that make Thai boxers look dumb?

You can't spoil the results for another art by getting a bad test score. We calculate the results by considering which martial artists have recently been getting the highest scores, not the lowest ones.

My answer was better than yours, but the quiz said I was wrong! Will you fix it?

We have tried very hard to check our questions and answers before adding them to the quiz. If you're sure we've made a mistake, please politely let us know so we can fix it for everyone else. There are a lot of questions in our database, so if you want to tell us about one of them it helps a lot if you can send us the whole question (cut and paste it into your email, for example) so we can identify it.

Before you contact us about a question being wrong, please bear in the mind the following considerations:

spelling
Sometimes you may disagree with our spelling of a foreign word. Wherever possible we have used the multiple choice of the quiz to prevent confusion — so even if that's not the way you'd spell it, the alternatives provided should help avoid ambiguity.
Japanese names
As stated in the book, Fudebakudo's policy on Japanese names is to put the surname before the first name except when it comes afterwards.
too hard or too easy
Inevitably there is some variation amongst questions of the same level as to how hard they are. This is part of the challenge of the MAQ. It's also possible that we've asked you about an art you've never heard of, or a TV series that was never on in your country. Instead of trying to be so general that you never get asked a question like that, we've put so many in that it's a feature of the quiz.
are you sure you're right?
There's a lot of misinformation kicking around regarding martial arts — we should know because it's something we specialise in. So please check your facts, and make sure you 'know' what you know from more than one source before you simply tell us that we're wrong. We might be, but then again, somebody is supposed to have checked it the first time round, so we might not be.