kitchen table math, the sequel: pop quiz, part 2

Sunday, July 18, 2010

pop quiz, part 2

Pew Research New IQ Quiz

I love these things.
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10 comments:

cranberry said...

11 out of 11!

It wasn't hard. Now, if I'd had to spell vuvuzela correctly...

July 18, 2010 at 7:19 PM
Lisa said...

More proof that I listen to too much news and others don't listen to enough.

July 19, 2010 at 4:50 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

lolllll---

I missed only one and I've barely been reading the newspaper for a couple of months now.

July 19, 2010 at 3:54 PM
Bostonian said...

A recent Marist
poll found
 that only 74% knew the country from which the U.S.
declared its independence.

Only 60% of young adults (ages 18-29) knew, as did only 56% of
non-whites (vs 82% of whites) and 67% of women (vs. 81% of men).

I think the 60% represents an upper bound on the fraction of people with the brains and motivation to get a real high school education, forget about college.

July 20, 2010 at 5:32 AM
Cranberry said...

I'm usually too busy to respond to polls. I assume others are, too.

July 20, 2010 at 6:58 AM
Bostonian said...

Cranberry wrote, "I'm usually too busy to respond to polls. I assume others are, too."

That does not explain the results, assuming the poll was conducted properly. Typically the pollster will first ask people if they are willing to participate, and if they are not, the pollster calls someone else, so those who refuse to participate are not included in the results.

July 20, 2010 at 7:14 AM
Anonymous said...

10 out of 11. It appears that the British switched prime ministers while I was distracted by watching Greece's economy implode.

"A recent Marist poll found that only 74% knew the country from which the U.S. declared its independence."

I bet if we wanted to get technical, almost everyone would get this *wrong* as that country no longer exists :-)

Americans tend to treat as synonyms the following: England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland). The U.S. declared independence from "The United Kingdom of Great Britain", which was replaced by the current UK a few years after our revolutionary war.

Just sayin ... :-)

-Mark Roulo

July 20, 2010 at 7:58 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

It appears that the British switched prime ministers while I was distracted by watching Greece's economy implode.

lollll---

You just made my day.

July 20, 2010 at 8:26 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

I've been on something of a news strike for a few months (not that I'm proud of this...) and I STILL got 10 right.

I missed the question about the depth of the BP well. Not having actually READ the coverage, I thought the thing was a couple of thousand miles deep.

July 20, 2010 at 8:28 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

We need LOTS more memorization in school.

LOTS

Also, we need to replace character ed with civics.

My mom told me that in her day kids couldn't graduate 8th grade until they had a solid knowledge of the constitution. (I'll have to ask her what exactly they needed to know, but I remember being struck by the fact that it was a lot more than I was expected to know---)

July 20, 2010 at 8:30 AM

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