Liar's Quiz

"Love truth, but pardon error."
François-Marie Arouet

Choose the best answer:

1.  Liar's poker is played
A. with a playing card stuck or pasted to each of the players forehead without them seeing it beforehand
B. by telling three "facts" about oneself and one of them a lie and player bet on the one that is a falsehood
C  with eight digit serial numbers on US dollars usually obtained from a bar. Players  bluff  as to how much  they have.

2.
When some one is telling the Truth about an event they usually

A touch their face or mouth unconsciously
B look up
C  blink less frequently
D all of the above

3. Choose the word that is not a synonym for liar
A. prevaricator
B. dissimulator
C. fibber
D. dishonest
E. perjurer
F. all of the of the above

4. According to the BBC's TheOneShow to spot the liar it is better to
A analyze the speaker's body language
B listen carefully to how the person is talking, note hesitations or when people stumble over their words.

5. When a smile is genuine.
A The eyebrows tend to go up
B Just the zygomaticus prompts the major muscles in the cheeks to contract
C The eyes crease up and the eyebrows dip slightly
D All of the above

6.   When people are lying they:
A are more graceful
B are near to stationary
C tend not to move their hands or gesture awkwardly
D wobble

7. According to "Is the truth too hot to handle?" from the Sunday Times, the people who  lie the most are:
A really beautiful
B  incredibly ugly
C extremely smart
D characterized by low to moderate intelligence

8. Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts asked his students to record their conversations and then count how many times they lied. The frequency that his students told untruths while talking was:
A  about one a minute
B approximately one for every three minutes
C about one every half hour
D two to five times a day

9. Best way to defrock a good liar is
A  listen to their voice for stress
B . see if they avert their eyes

10. Easily identifying mendacity is
A a necessary skill for success and even survival in a Machiavellian world
B is an evolutionary drawback and the proof is that so many people do this poorly

11. Dr Sean Spence, of Sheffield University, used brain scans to identify what happens inside our heads when we decide to fib.
He discovered that
A telling a lie uses the same areas of the prefrontal cortex
B lying ties up enormous resources of the brain
C  both are true
D  neither are accurate
 

  Post Script: The Top score is 100 %
 


Would you like to see the professor's answer key?

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
John F. Kennedy

Ce texte © 2008 Christopher Yukna - tous droits réservés
 





Professor of English
Ecole des Mines
75 cours fauriel
St.Etienne
FRANCE