General knowledge has been defined in differential psychology as "culturally valued knowledge communicated by a range of non-specialist media" and encompassing a wide subject range. This definition excludes highly specialized learning that can only be obtained with extensive training and information confined to a single medium. General knowledge is an important component of crystallized intelligence and is strongly associated with general intelligence, and weakly associated with openness to experience.
Studies have found that people who are highly knowledgeable in a particular domain tend to be knowledgeable in many. General knowledge is thought to be supported by long-term semantic memory ability.
A number of studies have found that males tend to have greater overall general knowledge than females, perhaps due to gender differences in interests rather than memory ability. Recent studies have found that general knowledge is associated with exam performance in schoolchildren and proofreading skills.
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Famous quotes containing the words general and/or knowledge:
“A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one’s knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.”
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