Do journalists really want to go there? It's rare I make it through an article without at least one glaring falsehood.

I once had a boss (a lifelong Californian) who had thought that New England was a single state. We made fun of him ruthlessly over it, but what makes it additionally pathetic: he was the managing editor.

We fight wars so Americans can learn geography.

(who said that? I wish it was me, but it wasn't)

Along the same lines, my favorite is the periodic lament that kids are not going into science and engineering, although the number of jobs that require real scientific and engineering skills continues to decline.

Kevin, a few notes:

18-24 year olds are neither "kids" nor "twentysomethings", though they overlap with the latter category.

Louisiana and Mississippi are not foreign countries.

As the point of both seems to be "our young voting-age population is more ignorant on a variety of geography-related matterns pertinent to current events and policy than many people think they ought to be", I fail to see how a comparison to older people would be particularly relevant to the point. It might illustrate how pervasive such ignorance is or isn't, but it certainly wouldn't, no matter what the findings, do anything to undermine the conclusion that we should do better at educating if we want young voters to understand these kind of things.

You are really straining for excuses to be snarkily dismissive, here.

Ambrose Bierce said, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Kudos, Burnside Writers Collective.

Also, Kevin, you've missed a point in your snarkiness. Even if our youth are better educated than our elderly about such things (which seems likely in many cases), this isn't good enough. Even if you're right, it doesn't mean we've done even mediocre by our kids while striving for great.

Today's workers are more productive than yesterday's workers. Todays business accomplishes more than yesterday's business. Would anyone compare the output of today's worker to that of 1970s workers and shake their heads? No.

So it is with students; technology has enabled our students to be more productive today than they were thirty or fifty years ago. It's unimportant to compare us to our own past; it's important to compare us to our contemporaries with whom we are vying for jobs, prestige, leadership, etc.

Come on, this is America. If it can't help you make a buck or get laid, what good is it to know it?

The test seems to be as much about current events as it is about geography. And when 74% of the respondents think that English is the primary spoken language worldwide, that tells you something.

My son's HS curriculum has no mention of geography. Neither does the MS curriculum.

Is it so terrible that kids don't know what they have not been taught?

Why do we pick on kids to go learn international geography on their own? How about non Christian religions? How many American HS age kids know what Islam is all about?

The average American kid reviews the US Constitution at least 5 out of 7 years of middle and high school. How about foreign political systems? Hint: it's not in the curriculum. How many know the basic difference between the US Presidential system and Parliamentary democracy (eg, Canada, or the UK)?

I am teaching at a low performing High School in Northern California and I am happy to report that these particular kids are smart, open and fun. We are a lucky to have them...

That is all.

What isn't answered is whether Al, Frequency Kenneth, Jay, or Tbrosz could find their ass if they had a bell on it.

It goes without saying that Jay could find Al's ass in a heartbeat...

Ah, Kevin, poor knowledge of the world (including geography) has been a feature of US education for generations. Adults don't know this because they were never taught about it and learned how interesting life is if you know it.

So, kids not knowing more than adults is just another way of saying US education sucks, has always sucked, and probably will suck in the future.

Why should we all need to know where other countries are? Everyone knows that the US is the greatest country in world history, so why should we trouble ourselves learning about inferior places?

:)

All the geography I need to know I learn from the "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segments on the Today Show.

The results are not as bad as many would like us to believe. In most of the questions at least around fifty percent of the respondents' answers were correct.

I think that in a few decades much less than 50% of the population will be engaged in meaningful jobs. Perhaps even now that is the case.

So the numbers are just about right.

I hope they show the kids after the survey where Iraq is located on the map, or where csi is based, if the kids got that one wrong too.

This seems like a non-issue to me. These days, I can go to my wireless laptop and look up anything instantaneously. Maps, definitions, histories - anything.

Why should we waste our kids' valuable cranial real estate with memorization of trivial facts? Can't we figure out better ways to develop their brain power?

Kevin wrote, but I'd like to see some actual evidence that our twentysomethings are really any more ignorant than our supposedly well-educated fiftysomethings before I start feeling too superior. Anybody know where I can find some?

Some what? Twenty-somethings, or supposedly well-educated fiftysomethings? Judging from the picture that graced your old, Calpundit, site, I'd guess that the supposedly well-educated fiftysomethings are a tad old for you and the twentysomethings way too young. Does your wife know of this interest?

I knew all of 'em except where the first CSI television show was set. I suppose this makes me your typical out of touch liberal.

(In my defense, though: I've never seen CSI, but I've lived on the real planet Earth my entire life. So there's a definite home-field advantage there.)

I was educated before there were "social studies" (we had history and geography) and before teachers unions. A mediocre teacher would be fired, sometimes halfway through the year.

Even in a poor rural school we had 100% reading literacy and 100% literacy in basic math - the parents and community would accept nothing less.

We memorized the location of every state, its capital, and some facts on physical goegraphy and economics. Then we started on the world.

Memorizing facts didn't make us brain dead, it gave us the basis to then study and analysis.

Well, I got the location of CSI -- after one viewing of it with a friend who's a devotee of crime shows. He makes me watch 'em sometimes when he comes over.

I think my favorite is Dog, the Bounty Hunter :)

But I blew the one on immigration. I guessed the number in the 50s, when the correct answer's 33%.

Everything else was *painfully* easy ...

Bob

The actual details of the test are interesting. For one thing, only 39% of the youngsters knew that CSI was set in Las Vegas; they did a lot better on many actual geography questions. AMany thought that India was a Muslim country: you could argue that it used to be, historically; not in terms of majority population but certainly in terms of political dominance. Mandarin may have more native speakers than English, but English is absolutely the dominant world language; Sri Lanka is not "on" any continent; there are Alps in Australia, &c. My point is not that Americans are great at geography; in fact, they are not even particularly good at writing geography quizzes to demonstrate their ineptitude :)

CSI-Vegas may LOOK like it's about vegas but most of the show is filmed in LA. That also goes for CSI Miami and CSI New York.

The same percentage of folks who can't find Iraq on a map also think that spending a trillion dollars while spreading depleted uranium all over the hapless country is a "good" thing.

Knowledge is useless if it isn't retained.

We do have a problem with remembering important stuff vs. trivia, seems our society values the latter at the expense of the former.

A college student may have access to the Net during a lecture via wireless laptop. Yes, they can Google the info but isn't more powerful to KNOW that China has a bunch more people than the US?

Turn off your cell phones, turn to the person next to you, say something intelligent, let them know you aren't completely oblivious of their presence.

The problem is folks being "cocooned"; via cell phones, ipods, ethnic bigotry, etc.

It's really not about what you know, but how hard you try to be ignorant. That's what concerns the NG Kevin!

save_the_rustbelt:

That's "analyze."

What -- they didn't drill you in grammar?

:)

Bob

If "What city is the original CSI based in?" is a legitimate geography question, then so is "What planet is Mr. Spock from?" or "What city did the Beaver grow up in?"

We memorized every country in the world and had to get 100% on a map test (or keep retaking it). The names of many have since changed (or we have adopted indigenous spellings and pronunciations).

This is crystallized intelligence -- there is no reason to expect adults age 50 to be worse than 18-24 year olds. I missed 3 (including the CSI location) but I know where Tanganyika and Ceylon are.

Taking the test, the results seem to be about what I would have expected. People got the easier questions right, had mixed results on the tougher questions, and struggled with the difficult ones. Considering that very few of these questions were geographic in nature, I'm not overwhelmed by fear here.

Should they have done better on some of the questions (the Mandarin as the most widely spoken language, perhaps)? Yes, of course - but considering the need for math and English competency (far more crucial to their everyday lives and futures than knowing the location of Sri Lanka, which is readily available in maps or books), I think a basic compentency in other areas is reasonable, and what was demonstrated here. Room for improvement, certainly, but hardly a crisis.

Tim Morris:

The Alps aren't in Austrailia, fer cryin' in the bucket. Unless you're saying that "Alp" is used by the Aussies as a generic term for "mountain."

But "the Alps" is specific, and refers to nothing other than the European mountain range.

And every island sits on a continental shelf.

Bob

Austrailia = Australia

People may have missed the Mandarin question because they knew there are many variants of Chinese---in other words, because they thought it might be a trick question. Personally, I rarely meet a (generically) Chinese person who speaks Mandarin as their primary language.

rmck1: The Alps are actually in New Zealand.

CSI-Vegas may LOOK like it's about vegas but most of the show is filmed in LA. That also goes for CSI Miami and CSI New York.

[cmdicely ultra-pedant mode ON]

A few notes:

It's "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," not "CSI-Vegas"

The show is partly filmed in LA. Some scenes actually are shot in Las Vegas.

[cmdicely ultra-pedant mode OFF]

I once had a boss (a lifelong Californian) who had thought that New England was a single state.

I think that geocentricity is a trait that runs particularly strong in Californians.

When I attending college in southern California people would ask me where I was from and I'd tell them Michigan. They'd usually ask "Where's that? That's somewhere in the East, right?"

And I'd reply, "Well, technically it's in the Midwest, but if you ask people from Michigan they probably identify themselves as being from a "Northern" state as we border Canada.

Then they'd ask which Eastern state it was.

Incredulous, I'd say, "You know -- the one that looks like a mitten, surrounded by the Great Lakes, easily recognizable from space."

And inevitably I would just get blank, uncomprehending stares.

"It's the only state shaped like a mitten!"

The conversation usually ended with: "If it's not California we don't really think about it that much. Did you know you can surf and ski here in the same day?"

Matt:

Mandrarin is a language of long-standing roots. But from what I understand from someone who lives in Guam, Cantonese is a much faster-growing language -- spoken in the emerging commercial centers -- because it can be converted into a phonetic pidgin and transliterated into the roman alphabet much more easily than with Mandarin -- which requires the memorization of thousands of very specific idiograms.

Bob

I agree, As you know most adults could not find their own ass with both hands...That's the state of the nation, whats new.

you mean there's other countries?????

Windhorse:

Now the *real* question is whether the Yoopers know anything about, say, Indiana :)

Bob

Question 1 is entertainingly phrased: "Which of the following ranges contains the correct population of the United States today?"

Personally, I think the correct population is around 200 million, but it probably would have been better to ask about the actual population. Correctness, of course, applies to the estimate itself.

If the multiple choice included Miami and New York scores would have plummeted.

"Which of these cities is the setting for the original television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation?"

This is a TV trivia question not a geography question. It might belong on a test measuring a student's knowledge of pop culture, but I can't for the life of me figure out how this has a single thing to do with competency in geography.

RSA:

It's closer to 300m, actually.

It was around 250m when I was a teenager.

Scary thought, that ...

Bob

…Michigan. They'd usually ask "Where's that? That's somewhere in the East… Windhorse 6:04 PM

LURKER: [cmdicely ultra-pedant mode ON] [cmdicely ultra-pedant mode OFF]

An embarassing 17 out of 20 for me. Fuck you Sri Lanka! Sounds African to me. Of course after it popped up incorrect, I could picture exactly where it was at.

And that immigration question was hard. And with all the Chinese shit I have floating around in my kids' room, you can't blame me for getting the export question wrong, can you?

kj:

Yes, we can.

To the re-education camps with you !

And don't worry -- we'll teach you Cantonese instead of Mandarin.

Much easier for an inferior non-Chinese white person to learn.

:)

Bob

This is a TV trivia question not a geography question.

I imagine, for each question, it should be possible to figure out how to answer it (plausibly, if not correctly) based on TV knowledge. For example, the continent on which Colombia is located? Colombian drug lords (Miami Vice, etc.) speak Spanish, and so do Mexicans (George Lopez), who are south of us (by contrast to Due North), which means the answer must be south something. . . South America!

RSA: Personally, I think the correct population is around 200 million, but it probably would have been better to ask about the actual population.

Our Dear Leader does not know where Iraq is on the map either,So to conclude our Pres. has a maturity level of a 18-24 year old.

As someone who used to teach HS Geogrpahy, this isn't really surprising...geographic knowledge just is not valued very much in a country where only 25% of the population has a passport and which has an exaggerated sense of its own importance. If you believe, as many Americans do, that we are the biggest and most important country in the world, then who cares about what goes on in the rest of the world.

As someone upthread already pointed out, most schools do not even teach geography anymore, which is reflective ofthe esteem in which the subject is held by our society.

Windhorse: The conversation usually ended with: "If it's not California we don't really think about it that much. Did you know you can surf and ski here in the same day?"

BWA HA HA, that's one in the eye for my craigie! I'm laughing through my yogurt!

I got everything right the second time I took it.

I am not terribly disturbed by the proportion that got geographical questions wrong--usually around 30-50%. One just has to allow that a certain proportion of the population will be ignorant most of the time. For example, 33% still approve of the job George Bush is doing as President.

But some responses suggest an egocentric and ignorant representation of the world. Wow, 54% of the 18-24 year olds think the population of the US is 500 million to 2 billion. 45% thought that the population of China was 2X that of the US, rather than 4X. We overestimate our population and fail to understand the size of the US: US = .3 Billion. Rest of world = 5.7 Billion. Maybe if more people understood reality, the US would be more willing to play nice with other nations.

And 74% of the respondents think that English is spoken by the largest number of people. We speak it. It must be most important.

Only 35% could place the earthquakes that killed 70,000 in Pakistan. Only 33% understood why New Orleans was flooded. 46% knew that the Sudan was in Africa. This is ignorance that has consequences.

It makes me wonder how GWB would do.

kj - I thought China exported the most too. Actually, I bet it does, but the test specified "dollar value" rather than volume . . .

NSA Mole,

So gay taunting is cool if it's done to the correct side of the poli spectrum? Good to know.

One of the questions called for identifying the world's most heavily fortified border. 37% of young people got the correct answer, which is North Korea/South Korea. I'd say that's very good, considering that it's basically a judgment call - for instance, what about Israel/West Bank, which is a wall?

jayarbee, "No matter which mode you're in, it's important to know the difference between significant and trivial. Likewise, pedantry and precision."

Then you'd better learn it.

I missed one (although I got the 33% immigration growth rate correct only by sheer luck).

Sadly, I am one of those dolts who thinks that most people speak English as their native language. My first instinct was to go for the Mandarin, but I thought that it had to be a trick question.

I figured that, when you combined the English speakers in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and much of India (not exactly a schlump in the populaton department), you were bound to have more English speakers than speakers of just one Chinese dialect.

I'm sure I would have known the correct answer had I seen more episodes of "CSI-Beijing".

I find it annoying that they didn't ask people to find Las Vegas on a map. Sure, they know it's set in Vegas, but where the hell is that? How far is it from where Grey's Anatomy takes place, or Boston Legal. (Hint: that last one is in Boston. If you know where that is.)

We have a board game that we play with our kids, 'Where In The World'. Different boards with maps showing borders but no country names - only numbers. One player draws a card and asks another, "Where is... Uzbekistan?" If you get the correct answer, there are follow-up questions on population, languages, currency, religion, literacy, etc. My spouse and I are fairly well educated (spouse is a PhD) and very well travelled, but it is a very humbling game to play...

One of the questions called for identifying the world's most heavily fortified border. 37% of young people got the correct answer, which is North Korea/South Korea. I'd say that's very good, considering that it's basically a judgment call - for instance, what about Israel/West Bank, which is a wall?

Posted by: Peter on May 3, 2006 at 7:47 PM

In the first place, the West Bank is not a nation. In the second place, it was not one of the options given on the test. In the third place, I don't think you realize just how heavily the North Korean/South Korean border is fortified.

Best comment:

What isn't answered is whether Al, Frequency Kenneth, Jay, or Tbrosz could find their ass if they had a bell on it.

It goes without saying that Jay could find Al's ass in a heartbeat...

Posted by: NSA Mole on May 3, 2006 at 5:30 PM | PERMALINK

Al--The Southern Alps are in kiwi land, that's why they're called SOUTHERN.

We've been hearing this for 30 years and there's no indication the general population has had any interest to learn, let alone remember, any geography or current affairs in the mean time.

Jack L's "trivial facts" frame and engender a broader interest both within our country and with the world. Anybody can support a war where they have no idea where it is, who it involves or what the effect might be, but can blindly follow their equally ignorant leader. Hurray for US education!

However, it's worse than you think. Although participants are encouraged to say "Don't Know" the figures show they are far happier to guess than to say so. Therefore the mean answer tends to 20% on chance alone. Q16-20 approx 14% with no "Don't knows".

Looked at in this light and remebering you can rework that percentage for the 2nd and 3rd answer; see Q9, 37% correct about Korean demilitaized zone, but 30% think Mexico, and 21% China-Russia.

I also would like a recount on Mandarin as the primary language of Chinese speakers.

And on current affairs, glad we got that Muslim question so right! And exports!

My understanding on Chinese is that Mandarin was the formal uniting (court) language and all the provinces had their own dialects. Cantonese is the southern dialect and seems to have been exported (with the people) by the British. Think Cantonese is the predominant Chinese dialect in Malaya, Singapore and UK Chinese.

I can't see (hear) all the peasants speaking mandarin. May be I'm wrong. May be it was all part of the great education.

So I early ranted about why they didn't test me since I'm 24. Well 90% for me. I missed the percentage change by immigration, and largest exporter of goods in dollar values. Most of the others were mind numbingly easy.

I thought this post was going to be about the TV show.

So where is CSI set? I didn't realize I was supposed to know that.

People shouldn't get too excited. If you could look at an unlabeled map of Africa, Eastern Europe, or the "-Stan" countries, and name everything correctly, you'd be doing better than I would. Especially the latter category.

Well, I scored 17/20. I'm proud to say I got the CSI question wrong.

What's the problem here? Are young Americans really that ignorant?

People shouldn't get too excited. If you could look at an unlabeled map of Africa, Eastern Europe, or the "-Stan" countries, and name everything correctly, you'd be doing better than I would. Especially the latter category.

Posted by: tbrosz on May 3, 2006 at 9:06 PM | PERMALINK

Nobody's asking for an encyclopaedic knowledge. Just some basis to load new facts into. If you have no framework you're lost.

What with Paki' and Afghan', you shold be able to place the other 'stans within about 500 miles. And when Khurdi' happens you should be able to get that.

Not so hard, tbrosz.

Unless you don't know where Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq are?

"My understanding on Chinese is that Mandarin was the formal uniting (court) language and all the provinces had their own dialects. Cantonese is the southern dialect and seems to have been exported (with the people) by the British. Think Cantonese is the predominant Chinese dialect in Malaya, Singapore and UK Chinese."

Mandarin is based on the dialect of Beijing, where the capital was for the last several hundred years.

All provinces have multiple distinct dialects, which fall into major families. The province of Fujian is known to have in excess of 100 distinct dialects. From a linguistic standpoint, the major families are not so much dialects of each other as they are separate languages. Think of Spanish and Italian. These are languages, not dialects.

Cantonese is the dialect of Canton, which is rendered in modern times as Guangzhou. it is also the dialect of Hong Kong, as most of the early emigrants to HK came from the Guangzhou area.

The majority dialect in Singapore and Malaysia is Hokkien, a dialect from Fujian province. Several other dialects are widespread throughout southeast Asia.

The early dominant dialect in the US is Taisanese, which comes from Taishan in Guangdong province. The core population in the North American Chinatowns is all Taisanese. In fact, you may still be able to find people some elderly people in SF or NY who are 4th or 5th generation American citizens who speak Taisanese, and barely any English.

The policy of the Chinese government is to ensure that all citizens cancommunicate with one another. hence, Mandarin is the sole medium of instruction in school. As a result, pretty much everyone speaks Mandarin, and whatever dialects are spoken locally. It is common for Chinese to be know multiple dialects. For instance, the actress Gong Li is known to speak 6-7 dialects, including Mandarin

There, thanks for letting express my pedantic self

Just to be pedantic for a moment, the NG test has a clear error, in the question which asks what time it is in LA when it's noon in New York. One of the choices given is "12:00 PM (noon)". Well, noon is *neither* AM (Latin for "ante meridiem" or "before noon") or PM ("post meridiem" or "after noon"), noon is noon.

We fight wars so Americans can learn geography.

(who said that? I wish it was me, but it wasn't)

The answer is comedian Paul Rodriguez, and *not* Ambrose Bierce, as I noted here.

What is really sad is that members of the Bush Administration can't find their ass with both hands and a flashlight....

I missed the CSI question; of course, I don't watch TV, so how ought I to know. Is that question about geography or pop culture trivia?

I might just add to darwin's pedantic self that the standard literary dialect of Chinese is based on Mandarin. A person might speak Cantonese in daily life, but to read official documents or most books, he needs to have a working knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin. Which is not to say that people don't also write in their own dialect; it just tends to be restricted to informal settings.

Also, I wonder what the above poster means by saying that Cantonese is more easily romanized than Mandarin. First, there are several well established romanization schemes for Mandarin. Second, don't confuse the complexity of the writing system with the complexity of the language. It's straightforward to express either language in a alphabetic system, assuming the appropriate use of diacritical marks for marking lexical tone (of which, Cantonese can have up to 6 per word).

I know my geography knowledge is much better than it was at 24 so I am not sure that the comparision of people of different ages is really fair. I would say that American's knowledge of Geography is not great (ask the guy in the supermarket check out line if he remembers the capitol of Canada, if he gets that right ask about Turkey's) However it is not really much different than people of similar education levels from other countries. Ask a Sri Lankan what the capitol of Bolivia is, and you will probably stump them as easily as you stump an American...

Well, at least National Geographic has a plan...

"National Geographic and leading education, business, and nonprofit partners have launched My Wonderful World, a campaign to increase global learning in school, at home, and in the community. With the help of parents, teachers—and you—we can help give our youth the power of global knowledge. Because kids who understand our world today can succeed in it tomorrow."

Let's click the link... ( http://www.mywonderfulworld.org/ )

Hmmm. Some plan.

Well, it would work better if I made the link linkable.

Let's try that again.

And on the topic of geography. The following website has some really cool geography games. Really helped me learn all the countries that weren't around when I was in grade school.

Those questions weren't tough enough.

Who here can find these countries on a map.

Bhutan
Brunei
Lesotho
Seychelles

Got those right? Now for the tough one, name all of the baltic states.

I'm with Kevin. Snarky quizzes deserve snarky comments

geography professor,

Finding them on the map is easy. How about this?

Thimpu
Bandar Seri B something or other
Maseru
Port Victoria

My spelling is probably off a bit since it was off the top of my head.

Oh, and for the baltic states.

Talinn
Riga
Vilnius

Mike:
Now, here in Santa Monica, if it's east of Westwood Blvd, it's Back East, somewhere.

When I was younger, people sold t-shirts that said "There is no life east of Sepulveda." Shoulda got me one of them...

shortstop:
BWA HA HA, that's one in the eye for my craigie! I'm laughing through my yogurt!

Arg! I've got yogurt in my eye! You crazy cow, you're doing it wrong!

Letterman tonight:

Such a % of 8th graders can't find Louisiana on a map!

... well, neither can ... the Federal Government!

19 out of 20- too high on the immigration one-I wonder if that is affected by all the recent publicity?
Not that surprising how many knew about Colombia...

Bob
From someone who's spent the last twenty years living in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan-
Sounds like you got fed a line of bull by a Canonese speaker with a grudge about having to learn Mandarin.

this reminded me of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Calvin: I know more about the private lives of celebrities than I do about any governmental policy that will actually affect me. I'm interested in things that are none of my business, and I'm bored by things that are important to know.
Hobbes: The media aim to please.
Calvin: Maybe the economy should be discussed in cheap motel rooms.

Maybe the economy should be discussed in cheap motel rooms.

I'm certain that it is!

it would be nice if our president didn't think Africa was a country.

It would be nice if our president did think.

re: California and New York views of the world. One of my college roommates had no idea where any of the states outside the northeast and the west coast were. However, he knew the names of several states, and to cover his lack of knowledge he'd sometimes refer to the rest of the country as the "M" states because it seemed to him that whatever place you were talking about, there was bound to be a state nearby that started with the letter "M".

As for parochialism, my grandfather told me that when they used to call passenger train departures from North Station in Boston, the conductors would sing out: "departing for Worcester, Springfield, and the West."

Re: Mandarin Chinese. phleabo and darwin have already covered most of this, but pretty much anyone who's gone to school in China in the past 50 yrs has learned to speak Mandarin. Everyone who's served in the army has learned to speak Mandarin. And despite the fact that major Chinese dialects are as different from each other as the various Romance (or Germanic) languages, written differences are fairly trivial.

I have no idea how Cantonese could be easily rendered in Roman letters in any situation that required using thousands (actually, about 1000) characters for Mandarin, but regardless of what parts of China are exporting what goods, all those factory owners and most of the factory workers can speak... Mandarin! And when they deal with each other, especially if they've arrived from different parts of the country, they speak... Mandarin!

Really, this isn't so complicated. Mandarin isn't "court" Chinese, it's "standard" Chinese and it's "school" Chinese. Most peopel who speak Arabic can speak Cairo Arabic, and those who speak French can speak Parisian French, so can those who speak Chinese speak Mandarin Chinese. The exceptions (4th generation immigrants in Singapore, London, San Francisco or New York; and those on the mainland who've never gone to school) are not within an order of magnitude of being enough to make Mandarin anything less than the most widely-spoken language on earth.

Ah, and didn't someone way upthread try to make the argument that maybe India really is a Moslem country?

No. That would be true of Pakistan & Bangladesh, as was decided when South Asia was partitioned more than half a century ago.

Before that, India was ruled by the British government, and before that by the East India Company. It's time under Moslem rule (which didn't make it a Moslem country) is about as relevant Spain's time under Moslem rule or Crimea's time under Mongol rule.

thanks darwin, phleabo and keith. Test me tomorrow.

NSA Mole: "What isn't answered is whether Al, Frequency Kenneth, Jay, or Tbrosz could find their ass if they had a bell on it."

They can and they did!

merlallen: "it would be nice if our president didn't think Africa was a country."

Look at the bright side.

In 2001, President Bush asked then-President Fernando Enrique Cardoso of Brazil whether there were black people in his country.

Then-NSA Director Condi Rice, noticing how astonished the Brazilian was, saved her boss by telling him, "Mr. President, Brazil probably has more blacks than the USA. Some say it's the country with the most blacks outside Africa."

Which just goes to show you that:

-- You're never too old to learn about geography; and

-- Condi Rice may not have known squat about al Qa'eda's plans to strike inside the U.S., but she sure is a whiz at Brazil's population demographics.

I think my favorte 2000 Bush geography blooper was when he referred to the Greeks as the "Grecians."

Which, you know, made me picture a nation of middle-aged men with pattern baldness rubbing a patent-medicine creme on their heads to hide their grey hair that they saw advertised on early-morning US TV :)

Bob

Donald, I don't usually find that stuff all that funny, but accompanied by your dramatic "They can and they did!" headline, that photo has me in tears. Thanks.

craigie: You crazy cow, you're doing it wrong!

There is no wrong! There's only "good," "better" and "levitating"!

Sombrero Fallout: ... well, neither can ... the Federal Government!

Y'all are starting my day right. Got the big giggles now.

I took the test. Short answer -- the test sucked. It wasn't a test about geography. Trivia questions on popular TV programs, which may or may not be watched by the respondent, don't even belong on such a test. Current event news doesn't belong on the test. The test is worthless as a geography test.

In fact, that's my main gripe with these periodic reports: they never tell us how adults do.

This is really lame. Teenagers are probably still in school and have had more recent exposure to the relevant material. Adults are probably not still in school, and, if they had been exposured to the relevant material, it was probably years ago. Memory fades with age.

rmck1: methinks you missed RSA's witticism.

Mithras:

I discounted it ("correct" meaning "politically correct" as opposed to "actual") because of the last line: "Correctness applies, of course, to the estimate itself."

Which seemed to focus on the literal meaning of the words.

Bob

Many thought that India was a Muslim country: you could argue that it used to be, historically; not in terms of majority population but certainly in terms of political dominance.

I think the real concern here is that kids who think India is a Muslim country are more inclined to think anyone with dark skin and a turban is a potential terrorist and so it's ok to beat them up in the streets.

Not that it's okay to beat people up in the streets as potential terrorists as long as you're sure they're Muslims, but you take the point.

Oh, fer Xsake, Kevin, if you wanna know how badly the adults of today do, look at how badly the kids of 20 years ago did. That's them, ya know. The few who went to college and studied geography might do better. The rest? The same or worse.

They can and they did!

Posted by: Donald from Hawaii on May 4, 2006 at 4:47 AM | PERMALINK

Dear God.

"Not being able to find Iraq on a map" sounds a lot worse than it is. Looking at a name-free map of the middle east, it wouldn't be hard to confuse next-door neighbors and similarly-shaped countries like Iran and Iraq. (Imagine a non-American confusing Colorado and Wyoming) But it's not as though the kids have no bloody clue where Iraq is. If they picked France or Egypt, it might be different, like someone mistaking Minnesota for Wyoming, but confusing Iran and Iraq on a blank map just isn't a big deal.

Looking at a name-free map of the middle east, it wouldn't be hard to confuse next-door neighbors and similarly-shaped countries like Iran and Iraq. (Imagine a non-American confusing Colorado and Wyoming)

Iraq and Iran aren't (unlike Colorado and Wyoming) similarly shaped.

People shouldn't get too excited. If you could look at an unlabeled map of Africa, Eastern Europe, or the "-Stan" countries, and name everything correctly, you'd be doing better than I would. Especially the latter category.

Yeah, well, that wasn't the issue. The issue was Louisiana, Mississippi, and Iraq, not "everything in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the '-stans'".

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if correctly locating those also was doing better than you.

And Colorado and Wyoming aren't (unlike Iran and Iraq) countries.

I'm not entirely sure more than 50% of New Yorkers could locate New York on a map of the United States. Who, after all, really cares about the rest of the United States? Now, not being able to locate Houston and Broadway on a map of New York with the street names removed -- this is the mark of an idiot.

And Iraq is about a fourth the size of Iran. That would seem important to know in these times, as well.

The only geography "lore" I can transmit is that when I lived in Engand I had a friend at school who knew the US had 52 states. I could not convince him it only had 50, even after I listed them, even after i wrote them down for him, and

In college I took a geography class. One one of the - major - tests the only question out of a 100 (not multiple choice) I got wrong was one about Australia. I called it "The Land of Oz" and the teach marked the answer wrong, having never heard it called that. She marked it wrong with a smiley face.

For the most spoken language in the world, English might actually be the correct answer. Given what other posters have mentioned, Mandurian is not the first language for most Chinese it is the second (ie learned in school not at home). Since we can now rule out the "primary" language rule we are now down to known / used. China boasts a 90.9% literacy rate. Including Chinese and others outside the country this could figure to be maybe 1.6 billion. Since English is the most popular "second" language world wide, who is to say the the total population that knows / uses English is not greater than 1.6 billion?

In the self test Kevin linked to the US was supposedly the world's largest exporter. Not true. The largest exporting nation wasn't even a choice. I just checked the 2005 CIA factbook and found that Germany exports a lot more than the US. So don't trust the National Geographics to know much of anything.

"48% of young Americans believe the majority population in India is Muslim. (It's Hindu—by a landslide.)"

That's not what the survey question asked. The survey question gave multiple choices and asked which was a majority Muslim nation. The answer was Indonesia. The fact that 20% guessed "India" means that they believed that, amongst that small set of possibilities, India was the most likely to be Muslim.

Now, had they phrased the question as "Which of these is the majority religion of India: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Spaghetti Monster?", then they'd be able to conclude that x% actually believed India to be majority Muslim.

But that's not what they asked.

FWIW, I missed three. I still think Honolulu is less likely to be hit by a devastating tsunami given its geographic situation, but I suppose Mexico City's pretty unlikely to get hit by a Gulf of Mexico event either.

Jed Tredmont: "I still think Honolulu is less likely to be hit by a devastating tsunami given its geographic situation ..."

... in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Last April 1, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the most destructive tsunami in United States history, which was generated by massive earthquakes in the Aleutian Islands north of Hawaii.

The series of 14 waves killed 146 people throughout the Hawaiian Islands, and almost completely destroyed the towns of Hilo and Lauahoehoe on the Big Island. Most of what is today East Honolulu (around Haunama Bay) was innundated, and the wreckage of the Alan Davis Ranch (namesake to a popular surf spot near Sandy Beach) was washed clear up the back of Kalama Valley,, some three miles from its locale.

There were 13 recorded tsunamis that hit Hawaii during the 20th century. The town of Hilo was devastated twice, first in 1946 and again in 1960, when an earthquake in Chile triggered a series of waves that reached the islands seven hours later, killing 61 people in Hilo alone.

The last major tsunami was in April 1964, which was triggered by Alaska's Good Friday earthquake.
That wave actually did far more damage to Crescent City, CA, killing 13 people.