Thursday, September 14, 2006

It would seem that I am Polish at heart

I just came across this bit of harmless fun if you've time to kill before the start of term. I must not be very consistent. The first time I did it the result was a deadheat between Poland and Finland which is OK too. But 88% Italian? Please! I love Italy but I'm experiencing some cognitive dissonance from the clashing of stereotypes: on the one hand I've got Polish cavalry tipping their lances at tanks; on the other hand I've got Italian tanks with 1 forward gear and 4 reverse.

You scored as Poland. Your army is Poland\'s army. Your tenacity will form a concept in the history of your nation and you\'re also ready to continue fighting even if your country is occupied by the enemy. Other nations that are included in this category are Greece, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Poland

100%

Italy

88%

Finland

81%

Soviet Union

75%

United States

63%

British and the Commonwealth

63%

France, Free French and the Resistance

56%

Japan

50%

Germany

38%

In which World War 2 army you should have fought?
created with QuizFarm.com

13 comments:

Nick Dymond said...

Hmm, mine was a little more predictable:

You scored as British and the Commonwealth.

Your army is the British and the Commonwealth (Canada, ANZAC, India). You want to serve under good generals and use good equipment in defense of the western form of life.

British and the Commonwealth - 56%
Italy- 56%
Finland - 56%
Poland - 56%
France, Free French and the Resistance - 56%
Germany - 50%
United States - 50%
Soviet Union - 50%
Japan - 44%

Nick

David J. Betz said...

Statistically, this is interesting.

The range is just 12 which suggests that with a reasonable margin for error you could be anybody, or everybody.

Your mode is 56 but since this is what you score for five of 9 countries (ie., more than half the range) it's not the most meaningful measure

Your arithmetical mean is 52.66666%, somewhere between France and Germany, fractionally closer to Germany, but as you'll no doubt agree in the context of World War II you can't be half German and half French--it's one or the other. So, this measure is also not helpful.

But your median, well, now that's interesting Nick. It turns out that you are statistically unambiguously, scientifically proven to be French!

This explains many things... :)

Daniel Ford said...

It seems that I am Finland -- not entirely surprising, since most Americans of my generation have a great affection for Finland. Plus the Brewster Buffalo fighter (called Sky Pearl by the FAF) is a favorite of mine.

Close behind, a tie between the United States and Italy. But then I'm an American and I love Verdi, so that's not hugely surprising either.

(I note that Nick wasn't actually BCE, except alphabetically. His BCE score exactly equaled his Italy, Finland, Poland, AND vive la France scores :)

Pip Leighton said...

I'm Polish with 100% but at least Finland scored second with 75%, which probably explains something about my attraction to my Finnish wife or maybe hers to me!! Sorry about the U.S. and Japan hitting the bottom at 25%.

Anonymous said...

Hey, everyone:

This should put me in good stead if I ever meet Pip and Laura in NYC.

You scored as Finland.

Your army is the army of Finland. You prefer to win your enemy by your wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force.

Finland 100%
British and the Commonwealth 88%
Soviet Union 88%
Italy 88%
Poland 88%
United States 75%
France, Free French and the Resistance 63%
Japan 38%
Germany 25%

In fact, exactly four years ago, I toured Finland and other parts of the former Russian Empire. Helsinki was beautiful.

Bill

David J. Betz said...

Hi Bill:
It's nice to see you.

Jokes aside what interests me about thsi quiz is how the questions are constructed and weighted. It might be an interesting exercise to construct our own quiz. For example, could you construct a quiz that accurately predicted a person's view of the international system (eg., classical realist, realist, liberal, marxist etc). Constructing a quiz like that means making judgments about the precepts of each view as well as weighing their relative importance. Hmmmm...

Nick Dymond said...

As a learning tool, the exercise of creating the questions and weighting them in the first place would certainly be interesting and would help with the all important terms and concepts, especially as the topic features many complex but definable if not definate definitions (hmm, too many variations of the Latin 'definire' in that sentence I think).
The OUP website for Baylis and Smith also has some fairly handy revision tools for helping with the same. However, their tool is more learning by rote and does not require much considered thought.

Sean Atkins said...

Wow. Apparently I’m Finnish at heart and only slightly American. It says I’m even Polish, British and Japanese before American. Not sure how I’ll take my re-commissioning oath in good conscience now. Perhaps I can undergo some “re-education” before then.

http://wimw-Bachmann.blogspot.com said...

Poland...88 per cent :-)

Why not. My ancestors lived in East Prussia, which is a part of Poland today.

Djen dobre,

Olaf

Mr. Dillon said...

Thanks David, that was a fun diversion.

My army is the army of Finland. I prefer to win against the enemy by my wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force.

Finland 88%
Poland 88%
France, Free French and the Resistance 81%
Italy 75%
British and the Commonwealth 63%
Japan 50%
Germany 44%
United States 44%
Soviet Union 31%

Mr. Dillon said...

I also like the idea of constructing a litmus test to see where we fall in terms of the spectrum to predictone's view of the international system (classical realist, realist, liberal, marxist etc). However, we might bias ourselves if we knew how it was constructed, it would be fun to know how we measure and compare that to how we think measure and who we think we are...

David J. Betz said...

It's funny that you should mentioon this Rex since I was having a similar thought the other day. Except that my idea was to have students construct a quiz which would accurately sort the IR theoretical of any respondent. There's much more to be learnt by constructing the quiz than by doing it.

Sergio said...

Funny game.

I came out unsurprisingly as:

You scored as Finland.



Your army is the army of Finland. You prefer to win your enemy by your wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force.

Italy 81%

Finland 81%

Poland 81%

British and the Commonwealth75%

France, Free French and the Resistance 69%

United States 38%

Soviet Union 38%

Japan 25%

Germany 25%

Sergio