Show your skills

Quiz: Test your knowledge!

Test your general knowledge


Updated on November 8, 2025Reading time: 2 minutes

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Tricky questions await you: How are you? (Source: Olga Tsikarishvili/getty-images-bilder)

Which planet rotates slowest on its axis? What do you call the fear of missing out on social media? And what exactly was the first device that could store voice recordings? Prove your knowledge! (Section 341)

General knowledge is understood as knowledge possessed by average people
can get educational opportunities. It’s not just about the knowledge that children and young people gain through education and training. This also includes knowledge that is absorbed unintentionally, for example when consuming media.

General education describes the most important knowledge and skills a person has
necessary in order to actively shape as many areas of modern society as possible. General knowledge should be the basis of everyone’s education. Both terms, general knowledge and general education, are unclear and not uniformly defined. In everyday language the two are often equated.

Simply put: general education requires general knowledge. If general knowledge is available, humans still need intelligence to use that knowledge to understand relationships and apply their knowledge. In psychology, general knowledge consists of everyday facts stored in long-term memory. To build this general knowledge, a person needs a certain level of intelligence.

The terms “general education” and “general knowledge” originate from the Enlightenment era. At this time it was known that the entire knowledge of civilization was not limited to individual books. Moreover, the quantity of knowledge does not depend on its quality. Specialized knowledge is of limited help or value to any individual. However, each person needs a concrete foundation of experience, insight, and values ​​in order to use specialized knowledge wisely.

During the Enlightenment, encyclopedists tried to collect all available knowledge and make it accessible to the general public – a revolutionary project, because until then education was only reserved for certain, usually higher, groups of society.

If general knowledge is defined as an educational canon, it depends greatly on the country, culture, individual education level and social environment. In this country, general knowledge includes knowledge in the fields of history, language, literature, art, politics, economics, geography, natural science and technology.