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Who wrote “Jane Eyre”? Who or what is a “temporary resident” and what currency do you pay in in Georgia? If you think you're a mastermind, prove it with this quiz and face 20 challenging general knowledge questions.

From history to pop culture to mathematics and physics, are you well-versed in many categories and subjects? You are certainly proud of your broad general knowledge. But what exactly does this term actually mean?

General knowledge is knowledge that can be acquired by people with average educational opportunities. It is not only about the knowledge that children and young people acquire during their upbringing and education. This also includes knowledge that humans absorb involuntarily, for example when consuming media.

General education refers to the most important knowledge and skills that a person needs in order to be able to effectively shape as many areas of our modern society as possible. On the other hand, general knowledge should form the basis of everyone's education. However, the terms general knowledge and general education are defined vaguely and not uniformly. Colloquially, the two are often equated.

Quite simply: general education requires general knowledge. If you have enough general knowledge, you also need your brain to be able to understand and apply it in context. In psychology, general knowledge consists of everyday facts stored in long-term memory. In order to build this knowledge, a person needs a certain level of intelligence.

The terms general education and general knowledge come from the Age of Enlightenment: at that time, people realized that all of civilization's knowledge was not limited to isolated books. In addition, the quantity of knowledge does not depend on the quality. The same is true of private knowledge, which provides only limited assistance to each individual.

However, everyone needs a certain basic wealth of experience, insights and values. Only these enable people to make useful use of the specialized knowledge they have acquired. During the Enlightenment, “encyclopedists” attempted to gather all available knowledge and make it accessible to the general public. This project was considered a revolution. Until then, education was intended only for certain sectors of the population, mostly higher.

If you define general knowledge as educational law, it depends greatly on the country in question, culture, individual level of education and social environment. In Germany, general knowledge includes, for example, knowledge of politics, economics, geography, history, language, literature, technology, natural sciences and art.