22 September 2020
I passed the Life in the UK test. But my journey to it was way more interesting than it seems.
This test is one of the requirements for UK citizenship application. The test consists in 24 questions about UK history and modern life. The pass mark is at 18, so 75% right answers to pass. There’s an official book to practice, made by the Home Office, where all the questions are made from.
History class has never been my cup of tea. As far as I remember I never enjoyed studying history. So learning the one of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (yes, this is the official name) would be slightly tough.
Knowing some friends who previously passed the test, I asked for their advice. All of them were pretty clear: crunch practice tests until you never fail. There are tons of apps/websites with question sets to practice. However, I wasn’t very keen to install random apps on my phone and jump between them to not miss a single question. So I took the problem in a different way.
My plan:
It was a very fun night, seriously.
Parsing data from one format to another is actually amusing, because every app is using different format: CSV, SQLite, JSON, TXT. Then with a simple Node script, the raw data can be transformed to the format of your choice. Then you own a little base of 7000 questions. Sounds great, but it’s not, because most of it are doublons. After implementing a very cheap way of detecting them, the output shrinked drastically, as you can see with the output above.
$ node main.js --stats
Base size: 3041
Tip count: 2939
Doubles: 4023
Same answers: 339
Most the these apps are simply reusing the same set of questions. For those who don’t, they rephrase the questions. I bet all the original questions are from practice books, then been copied to apps, then rephrased (probably by fear of lawsuit) for copycats. Sadly my dataset is not as clean I would like, but it’s good enough to play with.
After building a very basic PWA, and many UI tweaks, here is Life in the UK with the source code. This is very minimalist, no framework/build, the whole logic (HTML+CSS+JS) is in the index.html (~340 lines). Thanks to the PWA, it works offline. Also it keep track of the failed questions to make you practice them later.
Feel free to hack it, copy the questions for your own use, make PR to improve the app, help sanitising the dataset… or just test it and see how knowledgable you are about Life in the UK.
PS: I think I’m ready for my first DMCA takedown, but I don’t care I passed my test ¯\_(ツ)_/¯