I heard about this on a podcast. The tables are pretty interesting, and sorted as they are from easy to difficult, and also providing the most frequent wrong answers. It's also much more America centric than I thought - I would've never guessed Mayflower right, for example.
So... instead of coming up with new questions they quizzed a bunch of freshmen to see how hard they found their grandparents' pop culture to relate to? This is why no one takes psychology seriously. Here's what I find interesting:
"Fossils" - from 15 to 4
"Migraine" - from 25 to 6
"Shakespeare" - from 30 to 7
"Cheetah" - from 93 to 10
"Tsunami" - from 57 to 16
"Armstrong" - from 53 to 22
"Arson" - from 11 to 24
"Atlantis" - from 63 to 33
"Chameleon" - from 88 to 34
In general, science has fuckin' won over the past 40 years while crime has lost and bullshit pop culture references have fallen by the wayside. Except for ancient aliens bullshit.
And because it's psychologists, of course they've kept a gotcha question with multiple possible answers for 40 years ("WHICH PRECIOUS GEM IS RED?"). Trust me, nobody knows the difference between precious and semi-precious stones and spinels, garnets and carnelian are also red. Multiply by every other trade in there, no doubt.