Outliers Test UPDATED ACTUAL Exam
Questions and CORRECT Answers
Roseto Mystery - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔The neighboring communities of the town in
Roseto, Pennsylvania were intrigued to hear that the people of Roseto had a low rate of heart
disease while other communities were challenged by the recurring issue of dying younger due
to heart disease which the physician Steward Wolf found. Doctors tested this finding and
could find no reasonable proof which developed it to be known as the ¨Roseto Mystery.¨ The
idea that Gladwell is establishing in his introduction is that these people came from Italy and
had advantages that other people in Pennsylvania and this leaves the reader asking questions
about why that might be. The author will then go on to explain how people have
opportunities in life and advantages which helps cause this so the introductions helps evoke
thought and curiosity out of the reader.
Accumulative advantage - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Accumulative Advantage is when a
small advantage at the beginning of something, such as kindergarten, becomes a little
difference that leads to an opportunity that makes a bigger difference a bit bigger, and that
edge in turns leads to another opportunity, which makes that initial small difference even
bigger
Canadian Hockey - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Canadian hockey players born in the first
months of the year enjoy advantages that those born later in the year don't have. You also
write that birth month correlates closely with success in other sports. In Canada the eligibility
cutoff for age-class is Jan 1. A boy who turns ten on Jan 2 could be playing against someone
who doesn't turn ten for 12 more months and at age 10, a 12 month gap in age is a huge
difference in physical maturity. (the best are those born in the 1st the months due to being
oldest and most mature in age group)
Cutoff Age - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Those born closer to the cut-off date will be more
likely to be chosen for travelling squad.
Ecology Metaphor - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Gladwell creates a metaphor about Ecology
to explain how he thinks success is made. He describes how the tallest oak tree in the forest is
not the tallest because its seed just happened to be good. He continues his analogy by saying
that the tree grew the tallest because no trees blocked its sunlight, it was planted in rich soil,
no lumberjack cut it down and so on. That is how he believes successful people are created.
His purpose with this metaphor was to show that people aren't just born with success. They
may have a talent that gives them a head start, but there are many factors like the soil and
sunlight in this case that truly make them succeed and reach the top. This compares to his
,view of success and what he wants people to know that there are advantages out of sight that
boost people's levels of success.
Education and Relative Age - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Gladwell compared the
phenomenon of Relative Age to the cutoff ages of the Canadian Hockey League to show why
most successful hockey players are born in the beginning of the year. He relates this
phenomenon to education as well. When it comes down to it, education is far more important
to that of sports like hockey and he explains this to have a stronger claim for his definition of
success. He justifies that the students born early in the year advance far more than those who
are held back before the start of kindergarten because their birthday falls at the end of the
year. Many people think that the younger children eventually catch up to the children
originally ahead, but statistics state the contrary. The initial separation of the ages is divided
into achievement and underachievement says Gladwell. This means that the older students
are spiraled into being put in gifted classes where they learn in even more advanced classes
the next year, leaving the other children underrepresented and looked down upon. This
situation is parallel to Gladwell's overall image of success because it proves that those with
more opportunities placed in their life have further success.
Individual Merit - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔So a person's individual merit is their own
worth without anyone else helping them or influencing them.
Ingredients of Success - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Passion, talent, and hard work are still
the components of success, just most people forget there's one more: circumstance (when you
were born, where you were born, who your parents were).
Matthew Effect - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Sociologist Robert Merton created the
phenomenon "The Matthew Effect". He got his inspiration from a verse in the Gospel of
Matthew that, in short, basically means that those who are rich get richer and those who are
smart just get smarter and so on. Gladwell related this phenomenon to an ongoing situation in
the Canadian hockey league. In the junior league, children have the opportunity to get a head
start if they have an early birthday and because of that, they have the chance of more
opportunities than others. Gladwell further explains this by saying that one opportunity can
lead to an even bigger one and all of a sudden, the hockey player is very successful and
becomes an outlier. He presented this topic to demonstrate that you can't be successful just
for being good at something. He believes there are more parts to it and that is what he wants
to share with his readers in his book.
Meritocracy - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔a system in which promotion is based on individual
ability or achievement
, Relative Age - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔Relative Age alludes to the phenomenon that
children born in the early part of the year have a higher chance of becoming successful than
those born later. Roger Barnsley, a Canadian psychologist, was the first to discover this
phenomenon at a hockey game in southern Alberta. His wife was reading the program that
described each of the players when she noticed something strange. She realized that the
majority of the players were born somewhere between January and March. Barnsley began to
do research to see if it was just a coincidence, but the pattern didn't change. There was in fact
reason behind this crazy connection. In Canada, the cutoff date for age divided classes was
January 1st, meaning a 10 year old could be practicing with someone who still has almost a
year before he turns 10. Because of this, the older kid, with more maturity, would be chosen
by scouts. That is where the success train begins because he will be given more opportunities
to do better and better. This goes to show Gladwell's view of success even more because the
hockey players who are chosen in the beginning are given loads of opportunity, determining
their success. He wrote in detail about Relative Age to provide a real life example of one
team's player's successes that branched out not only into the whole Canadian Hockey League,
but other sports to show how success is attained.
Introduction to Bill Joy - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔He was a computer programmer who
fell in love with software at the University of Michigan. He rewrote a software and made the
majority of software for modern day computers, founded sun microsystems, and rewrote
Java.He didn't just have natural talent. He was lucky and was presented with opportunities
that led to him getting the 10,000 hours of practice.
Ericsson's Study- Violinists and Pianists - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔A study orchestrated by
psychologist, K. Anders Ericcson, and some colleagues at Berlin's Academy of Music divided
violinists into 3 groups based on their skill level. The first group contained the students with
the most potential. The second were those known to be good, and the third were those who
would probably end up as a music teacher and unlikely to ever become a professional. The
main question asked to the violinists was how many hours they had practiced since picking
up a violin. The study found that the elite had averaged around 10,000 hours, the "good"
around 8,000 hours, and the upcoming music teachers a little over 4,000 hours. Gladwell
wanted his readers to see these statistics to show where practice gets a person and how
different levels of hard work have different outcomes of success. This study was also
performed on amateur and professional pianists with corresponding results. Ericsson found
out that out of all of the musicians in the study, none of them were "naturals", and the only
thing that divided the groups were the hours they put in. Gladwell concludes by saying that
those who apply hard work and time into a skill are those who will succeed, relating this
message to his own understanding of success.
Mozart and Bobby Fischer - CORRECT ANSWER- ✔✔"Even Mozart—the greatest musical
prodigy of all time— couldn't hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in. Practice
isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."Mozart,
often considered a "prodigy," who spent at least ten years working on one of his famous
