Quiz Book Review: Are You Smarter Than a Ten Year Old?

I, like a lot of quizzers I am sure, have amassed a large number of quiz books over the past few years. Some more useful than others. An excellent way to test yourself, identify areas of weaknesses and learn new facts. I did intend to make this a bigger feature of the blog a few months ago but as I work my way through my collection I thought I'd mention on The Quiz Addict how useful I find some of the books.

I really have picked a bad place to start. I will not go into the nerdy way in which I decided this was the book I was going to start with but suffice to say it was a random choice. I picked this up in a closing down sale of a book shop near to me a few months ago for 99p……bad move!


Are You Smarter Than a Ten Year Old? to be fair, is not a bad TV show. The whole idea of the show if you haven’t seen it before is testing adults on subjects on the children’s national curriculum up to the age of ten. The show has all sorts of gimmicks such as helpers etc but more of that another time.

The book to go with the show though is terrible and Are You Smarter Than a Ten Year Old? Is easily the worst quiz book in my collection and by far the most useless. It perhaps is not fair to compare the Are You Smarter Than a Ten Year Old? book to other titles as this is a TV tie in so is very restricted but so much about this book is bad bad bad I am not even giving the usual link to buy it online!

First off there are only 451 questions. Quality is better than quantity but here both are lacking. They are divided in 41 rounds of 11 questions. You work your way up through the money in each round but unlike the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? books there are no other ways to play this such as using lifelines. It’s just four choices for each.

The question writing is so poor and inconsistent. Some of the £250,000 questions are easier than anything else in the book and there is no satisfaction at getting 11 in a row and completing the whole round.  The questions often repeat bits of information and are so obvious it just screams of laziness.

One of the main reasons I buy quiz books is to learn new information and apart from maybe 1 or 2 little bits of information on the Religion questions (a weak point for me) I learnt nothing. It took about  2 hours at most to go through the whole book and I got very little from it.

All in all this is a book best avoided, even as a gift, even for fans of the show it is a book I would not suggest at all is worth your time investing it.