The questions that fooled almost everyone
Between 6 and 10 October 2026, Tilt players made 26,383 guesses across 25 questions. Some of them were nearly solved by the crowd. A few were missed by almost everybody. The pattern behind them says a lot about how people think about weight.
A quick reminder of how scoring works, because it matters for reading the numbers. Each round is worth up to 100 points. A guess within 5% of the true answer gets all 100, and the score falls away steadily until a guess that is eight times too high or eight times too low gets nothing. From Tilt #44 on, rounds whose answer is in the thousands or more are marked more gently (a mega round now allows a miss of up to 25 times before it scores zero), so the averages for #44 and #45 below are a little kinder than the earlier ones. Because the scale is about ratios, being off by 2,000 when the answer is 300,000 is a fine guess, while being off by 3 when the answer is 4 is not.
The hardest five
| Question | Answer | Average score | Players |
|---|---|---|---|
| an orca in little brown bats (Tilt #41, round 5) | 960,000 | 4 | 882 |
| a zebra in peanuts (Tilt #42, round 5) | 300,000 | 12 | 1,479 |
| a cherry in ladybugs (Tilt #45, round 3) | 230 | 16 | 661 |
| Sirius in Venuses (Tilt #43, round 5) | 840,000 | 17 | 1,065 |
| a Saturn V rocket in washing machines (Tilt #45, round 4) | 39,000 | 19 | 637 |
An average of 4 out of 100 means that nearly everyone scored zero: their guess was at least eight times away from the answer. Here is what made these so slippery.
An orca in little brown bats
An adult male orca weighs about 7,200 kg. A little brown bat, one of the most common bats in North America, weighs about 7.5 grams in summer, about as much as one and a half sheets of printer paper. Dividing one by the other gives almost a million bats. Both animals are easy to picture; the problem is that the picture tells you size, not mass, and the gap between them is six orders of magnitude.
A zebra in peanuts
The zebra (an adult plains zebra, about 300 kg) feels like a medium animal, and a peanut feels like nothing at all. A shelled peanut weighs about a gram, so the answer is around 300,000. Nearly 1,500 people played it and the average was still 12. When one side of the scale is close to a gram, the answer is simply the other side's weight in grams, which is a useful trick to remember.
A cherry in ladybugs
This one is the most interesting, because the answer is only 230. A sweet cherry weighs about 8 grams, a seven-spot ladybird about 35 milligrams. Insects are so light that most of us have no feel for their weight at all, so there is nothing to anchor a guess to, and a guess can drift a long way in either direction. The lesson: a small answer can be just as hard as a big one when one of the two things is unfamiliar.
Sirius in Venuses
Sirius A, the brightest star in the night sky, has about twice the mass of the Sun. Venus is a near twin of Earth. It takes about 840,000 Venuses to balance the star. Players who knew that the Sun is about 333,000 Earths could get close by doubling that and allowing for Venus being a little lighter than Earth; everyone else was guessing in the dark.
A Saturn V rocket in washing machines
A fully fuelled Saturn V weighed about 2,800 tonnes at liftoff, and almost all of that was propellant. A washing machine is about 72 kg. The answer is around 39,000. The rocket we picture is a tall, slim tube, not 2,000 tonnes of fuel.
The easiest five
| Question | Answer | Average score | Players |
|---|---|---|---|
| a grape in blueberries (Tilt #44, round 1) | 3.6 | 78 | 1,050 |
| a boxing glove in bagels (Tilt #43, round 2) | 4.3 | 70 | 1,146 |
| a red kangaroo in Labradors (Tilt #44, round 2) | 2.4 | 70 | 1,028 |
| a cat in ducks (Tilt #43, round 1) | 4.1 | 69 | 1,169 |
| a lion in koalas (Tilt #45, round 1) | 16 | 64 | 702 |
Every one of these has an answer under 20, and both objects in each pair are things you have held, carried or at least seen next to each other. When the two weights are within a factor of ten, people are good at this. A grape and a blueberry sit in the same bowl; a cat and a duck are about the same kind of armful.
What the numbers say
Three things stand out.
- The size of the answer predicts the score. The eight questions with an answer under 20 averaged 64 points. The five with an answer over 100,000 averaged 24, and the only one of those that went well was the helicopter in bottle caps, at 55, played under the gentler marking that started that day.
- Big gaps are hard to feel. Our sense of weight is good at "twice as heavy" and poor at "a hundred thousand times as heavy", so the mega rounds, where answers run into the hundreds of thousands, drag the scores down most.
- Unfamiliar things go wrong in both directions. Bats, ladybugs and stars all broke intuition, whether the true answer was 230 or nearly a million.
If you want to get better at these, read why weight is so hard to guess, which turns these lessons into a method. Every weight used above, with its source, is on the weights page.