Not being from the UK + most often hearing the word "shire" associated with Middle Earth = not really sure what it means. I tried city, town, village, hill....forest...township...siredom....I might have gotten it eventually, perhaps.
It's not a word that's used outside of the UK and even within the UK it mostly appears now in proper names. You can logic it out, but it isn't immediately obvious.
I would say the synonym question as written is particularly poor suited for a quiz like this. Consulting a thesaurus, there are at least 4-5 different potential answers, but none of which are apparently acceptable. If there is only going to be one acceptable synonym, then there needs to be a more specific clue.
I read it as "homonym" and tried shier, shyer, sure, cheer, sheer etc. racking my brain trying to figure out if we are using LOTRs movie, Cockney, Yorkshire etc. pronunciation. After wasting two minutes I moved on and got back to the question with about 30 seconds left and finally reread the question.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and have lived in Virginia for 29 years. I have never once heard any part of the Commonwealth referred to as the Bay Area. Tidewater, yes. Bay Area, no.
I honestly can't get my head round this all-too-common complaint.
If I go to an Italian-language quiz site and see a question asking for "la capitale del Regno Unito", what kind of a derp would I have to be to demand that the answer should be "London", saying that "only foreigners call it Londra"? I'd also presumably take great offence at "Regno Unito", which is off the chart foreign!
Foreigners often have different names for things, it's a pretty integral part of being foreign.
I think it speaks to the need and fun of knowing trivia. I have been thinking about this. Like you, I consider that if a quiz is in English, then the answers should be in English--it shouldn't be surprising that answers in other languages don't count.
At the same time, it's fun to know the "native" or "matching language" names for things--to know München is Munich, and so forth. And as I've been taking these quizzes, it's really not uncommon that these are themselves trivia questions.
Because users of this site love knowing trivia like this, and love showing it off (to themselves or to others), the urge to want to demonstrate it is strong.
The argument doesn't hold up, but I can understand where it comes from.
The other factor is simply people's desire for quizzes to cater to them so they can excel, and lots of speakers of English as a second language know a cognate for the answer based on something other than the English name--so they feel "robbed" when they get it wrong.
I would bet a fair amount of money there is a quiz on this site that is some variation of "give the English names for these famous cities written in their native language." You'd have Roma, Koln, Moscow written in Cyrillic, Warszawa, and so forth. In fact, this very quiz asks for the former name of Kolkata, which is really just the English name for Kolkata from the British Raj days.
It depends. Users can be expected to know that Roma is Rome in English since it is part of a basic knowledge of English. However, that is not the case with all place names. For example there was once a quiz that asked for the town where the piped piper comes from. I knew it was Hameln, but the quiz only accepted Hamelin, the English version. I felt a bit cheated because as one of the very few users who knew the answer I was also expected to know the English name of a town that is only ever mentioned in this little-known fairy tale.
If the place name is little-known I'm in favor of accepting the original name as a type-in. Otherwise it's not just a question of geography but (for non-natives) also a fairly advanced and obscure English test.
Despite being considered by most (including Jetpunk) as the judicial capital of South Africa, Bloemfontain has had only the second highest court since the 1990s. Johannesburg has the highest court, which in absence of constitutionally defined capitals looks a whole lot like being the judicial capital...
If I go to an Italian-language quiz site and see a question asking for "la capitale del Regno Unito", what kind of a derp would I have to be to demand that the answer should be "London", saying that "only foreigners call it Londra"? I'd also presumably take great offence at "Regno Unito", which is off the chart foreign!
Foreigners often have different names for things, it's a pretty integral part of being foreign.
At the same time, it's fun to know the "native" or "matching language" names for things--to know München is Munich, and so forth. And as I've been taking these quizzes, it's really not uncommon that these are themselves trivia questions.
Because users of this site love knowing trivia like this, and love showing it off (to themselves or to others), the urge to want to demonstrate it is strong.
The argument doesn't hold up, but I can understand where it comes from.
The other factor is simply people's desire for quizzes to cater to them so they can excel, and lots of speakers of English as a second language know a cognate for the answer based on something other than the English name--so they feel "robbed" when they get it wrong.
If the place name is little-known I'm in favor of accepting the original name as a type-in. Otherwise it's not just a question of geography but (for non-natives) also a fairly advanced and obscure English test.
Despite being considered by most (including Jetpunk) as the judicial capital of South Africa, Bloemfontain has had only the second highest court since the 1990s. Johannesburg has the highest court, which in absence of constitutionally defined capitals looks a whole lot like being the judicial capital...