When you are learning English, you may encounter words that you know the meaning of, but you don’t know what the author wants to express. This may be because you don’t understand its background culture. Mr. Ge Chuanchu emphasized in his book "Addressing English Learners":

Not being able to read English reading materials is related to not understanding the English background.

English background refers to cultural background knowledge that is natural for native English speakers, including history, geography, mythology, Bible, customs, proverbs, etc.

The famous vocabulary test website recently launched a cultural background knowledge test.

How about it, sounds interesting!

Test Your collects the top 10,000 cultural entry pages with the most views (English Wikipedia).

For example, the following are some of the most popular keyword rankings:

Familiar names such as Elon Musk, the Iron Man of Silicon Valley; the late famous physicist; the singer known as the "God of Rap" and who won 15 Grammy Awards; the male professional tennis player Roger are all listed.

The test method is basically the same, except that the words are replaced by the above English cultural knowledge items including celebrities, books, movies, TV shows, songs, etc.

The difference is that Test Your also adds knowledge supplement tips next to all test entries given, which can be seen by hovering the mouse over the question mark icon on the right side of the entry.

The test is divided into four steps:

Step 1 Click to select the terms you are familiar with from the total 25 cultural terms given.

The system will determine the approximate cognitive stage you are in based on your test results in Step 1, and adjust the difficulty of Step 2.

Step 2, Step 3, and Step 4 will continue to provide more entry options (about 120 in total) based on the test results of each step. Click the button at the bottom when everything is done.

Finally there is a questionnaire. If you don't want to answer, click the GET button at the bottom to skip.

The system will calculate a result based on your answer. That is, if you complete all the 10,000 popular cultural entry tests mentioned above one by one, how many entries are you familiar with?

Of course, no matter how many are known out of 10,000, whether it is 3,000 or 5,000, it is meaningless to look at this number alone. What we want to look at is your data compared to all testers.

The figure below is the test data percentage of all native English speakers over 18 years old who have participated in the test as of today given by the website. The results show that:

The average test result for adult native speakers is around 4,000. In other words, if you want to match the level of native speakers, it must reach at least 4000.

In terms of English, in addition to the huge difference in vocabulary, there is also a considerable gap in cultural background cognition between non-native English speakers and native speakers.

Abstract English thinking, psychology, personality habits, etc. are precisely placed on these concrete people and things. I think this is one of the important reasons why "even if you have a large vocabulary, you will still encounter reading difficulties."

Test address:

Everyone is welcome to share your test results in the comment area to see what level everyone is at.