Civics Quiz. Some of the questions are a little tricky, but it's the type of stuff most American should know. I know that "college educators" are often specialists, but when the average American scores 49% (itself a pretty good number considering what you hear, but I wonder how "average" the person who took the test was), you might expect a little more of a gap there.
[Via Jeff Jacoby on Twitter]
"Syme: It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. You wouldn't have seen the [Newspeak] Dictionary 10th edition, would you Smith? It's that thick. [illustrates thickness with fingers] The 11th Edition will be that [narrows fingers] thick. Winston Smith: So, The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect? Syme: The secret is to move from translation, to direct thought, to automatic response. No need for self-discipline. Language coming from here [the larynx], not from here
[the brain]" -1984 (film) |
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Solomonia
29 out of 33 here. Geez, what kind of educators are we talking about?!?
I got 29 also.
We should start our own college?
OK, but I offer no loans or scholarships.
32 out of 33.
Nappy zoned out on one of the questions and didn't read the choices carefully for one question and flubbed it.
"College educators" covers a lot of ground. One would hope that history, law and poli-sci folks would do better than poets, physicists, engineers, musicians, ...
Give me a break, dude. I majored in social justice and and non-iterative narrative studies ;-)
Pretty easy. 85%
I got 100%, but my answer to the question about Socrates et al. was a pure guess.
OK, Ron Newman; so you want to be Dean of Faculty?
:)
There's also a noticeable bias towards laissez-fair capitalist economics, which you have to account for when answering some of the questions.
(and yes, I know how to spell laissez-faire, but I don't always type well and there's no way for me to edit a comment after I post it)
I got 29, too. I wonder if it was the same 29 as you guys. That's around 88%. Not bad.
I can't believe that college professor missed 45% on average! No way could you miss that many.
The questions weren't hard at all. I missed one question because I didn't read all the answers carefully. Still, I did okay. These were not questions to struggle over.
But, Nappy, I'm impressed!
I got 81.82% and I AM CANADIAN, with no college.
Economics questions were liberal thinking at best.
Ron,
You can use the Preview button to see if it is
lazylaissez or not.they are very common question that are easy to be answered and there is no need any degree, person just has to be normally informed.
Preview only shows you so much. As with any proofreading, there's a lot of stuff you just don't see until it's too late. That's why it's good to have a second pair of eyes or wait a while. It's not that important for this informal forum, especially when some, e.g., Arabian, have such poor mastery of the language—and in his case, it's compounded by his having nothing intelligent to say.
Sometimes it would be nice to go back in and tweak something. (Google Buzz lets you edit your posts.) Nappy usually lets those little brain-farts be. It's not like they're noxious gas that will clear the room. Better that than waste everyone's time by drawing attention to them.
Not gonna preview this. If anyone asks, the dog did it.
#12 Joanne
For Nappy, that would be #29 on the definition of a public good.I thought it was a good quiz (although I also noticed the bias toward laissez-faire economics).
I got 30 out of 33. I missed #11 (I didn't remember enough about the Anti-Federalists), #15 (I honestly didn't know where "wall of separation" comes from, although I should have), and #30 (increase spending during a recession?!?).
Had there been a quiz question on how to spell laissez-faire, I would probably have gotten it wrong.
Thanks for the pointer, Sol!
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
I got 28.
Ron Newman with 100%, did Saddam Husseins Iraq ever have WMDs???? It should be "easy" for you, eh?
To Nappy,
If I remember correctly, I got that question wrong, too. But not because I'm unfamiliar with the term "public good."
The definition of a public good that I learned in economics class was: goods or services supplied by the government because they would not be profitable for private companies to provide: e.g., highways.
I thought that the citizenry did pay for public goods: through taxes. So I was focused on a definition based on who provided the goods (or services).
Yes, Daniel, increase government spending during a recession. That was part of the thinking behind the New Deal, and that's one of the bases of Keynesian economics. If you pull back during a recession, you only make the recession worse.
Nappy doesn't remember much from Econ 101 a wicked scary number of decades ago—even sitting in the second row of a lecture hall for 350 didn't make the class more palatable. But you and Nappy think alike, girlfriend, at least on that question.
public good: "a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it" because non-taxpayers benefit from it just as taxpayers dol
These days many college professors are foreign ... it is not at all unreasonable for them not to know US history (and, especially, to sympathize with some of the economic policies promoted by the survey). How many of us know any Chinese, Indian, or Soviet history?
Though I am foreign born too, I ended up with 29/33.