Science

Science covers biology, physics, chemistry and astronomy, and the questions are built around understanding rather than vocabulary. Knowing that CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing tool is worth more here than being able to spell it.

The easy end is the stuff most people retain from school: which gas makes up most of the atmosphere, what the hardest natural substance is, which organ produces bile. The medium band is where it gets interesting — the Doppler effect, what a black hole actually is, how many chromosomes a human body cell carries. The hard questions lean towards physics: the unit of electrical resistance, which particles are tied to the Higgs field, and what Schrödinger's cat was constructed to demonstrate.

That last one is a good example of how these questions are written. The famous answer — that the cat is both alive and dead — is the setup, not the point. The question asks what the thought experiment illustrates, and the answer is the paradox of quantum superposition. Questions built this way reward people who understood something rather than people who memorised a punchline.

Science also carries a share of the estimation questions, where instead of picking from four options you name a number and score by how close you get. Those work particularly well here: distances, temperatures and quantities in science span orders of magnitude, so a good estimate is a real skill rather than a guess.