On 7/2/07, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
--- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
People in general are ill-informed. You
wouldn't believe
how much urban
legends are believed to be true and how much info is
misconstrued.
Examples:
1) You've just been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. She
takes away the sword.
What does she say afterwards?
2) What are lemmings known for?
3) What form are raindrops?
4) What do dolphins drink?
I'm equally concerned that you think that knowing the
answer to that question constitutes anything more than
trivia that's even less useful than knowing cartoon
characters. Utterly useless even to the knighted who
already have what they came for.
Was it an attempt to make some other point? Maybe that
even the Queen is painfully ill-informed?
The point of the article, however, is that current-event
knowledge has gotten worse. It's a relative measure.
I.e., not that someone feels that knowledge in general is
lacking based on an arbitrary point, but that it has
dropped since the Internet (including Wikipedia) has become
widely available.
Maybe the problem isn't the Internet, but in the schools
teaching reading comprehension.
~~Pro-Lick
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--spam may follow--
I don't know what article the questions are from, but only two are
actually trivial knowledge. I've seen a lot of so-called measures of
people being misinformed where the measurement is itself misinformed.
American schools no longer teach reading comprehension, in fact they
are doing away with novels in high schools, so that the schools can
teach the kids how to pass tests. Maybe it's part of this generation
that made this quiz.
KP