Trivia Gauntlet Quizzes
Knowledge runs with a scoreboard attached. Some are gentle, some are unkind, none of them are an exam.
Fair questions and merely obscure ones
A good trivia question leaves you a route to the answer even when you do not already hold the fact. It rewards a chain of reasoning, this dish depends on a chilli, chillies crossed from the Americas, therefore the dish cannot be as old as the story claims, and you finish it feeling that you could have got there with a bit more nerve. A merely obscure question offers no route whatsoever. Either you happened to read the same footnote as the person writing it, or you did not, and no amount of thinking closes the gap.
Everything in this lane is built around that distinction. Flags, unlabelled coastlines, the year a familiar event actually happened, where a dish or a gadget really came from: subjects where a careful guess beats a blank stare, and where the answer usually has a reason attached that is more fun than the fact itself.
The wrong answers are the difficult part
Writing the correct option takes a minute. The other three take the afternoon. A distractor has to be plausible enough that partial knowledge might reach for it, without sitting so close to the truth that the question stops being answerable. The standard failure modes are easy to spot once somebody points them out: the option that is noticeably longer and more hedged than its neighbours, the pair that mean the same thing and therefore cancel each other out, and the obvious joke that reduces a four-way choice to a three-way one.
Decent sets also keep the near-misses close. Put a date a year or two off the real one rather than a century away and the round stops being a memory test, becoming instead a question of how firmly you hold something you were fairly sure about.
About the percentage in the title
One thing to be straight about. A short quiz carries no norms behind it. There is no standardised sample, no calibration and no quiet analysis of anybody's results. A score on this site describes only how you answered this particular set, not how you rank against a population.
Your score is the count of things you happened to know on this particular set of questions, and a different set would move it considerably. Take these as a pub round with a scoreboard attached: enjoyable, thoroughly arguable, and no reflection on anything beyond the seven things we chose to ask.