General knowledge requires crystalized intelligence; this is the retention of facts and figures and is a skill which is usually attained by a conceptualization of the environment.
General knowledge skills are an indication of your awareness of the connectivity between events and places, and your efficiency at retrieving information from long term memory.
There is always an issue of cultural bias in general knowledge questions, and the challenge is to prevent assessments that focus on arbitrary trivia. People from all cultures and social strata should be equally represented, and difficulty levels should not favor any one group or culture.