By now, most of you will have heard about the appalling resultsof a National Geographic geography quiz for young adults. (Thanks to HappyFunBall for pointing this out.) Take the test for yourself. Feel smart.
Note: Mexicans could locate both the US and Mexico more often than Americans could.
I took the sample quiz and got 19/20 right. A few years ago, my score would have been lower by a couple of points.
Re:Wheee
jjohn on 2002-11-22T19:17:55
Wow! That's the question I punted on too. I knew that Islam has over a billion followers and I assume Hinduism and Buddhism are around the billion mark too. For some reason, I didn't think Christianity was over a billion at all. Weird.
Those numbers are interesting. Does it give some context to the War on Terrorism? I don't know, but it is an interesting side note.
Re:Wheee
hfb on 2002-11-22T20:41:56
Well, #1 is really apathetic atheists I think but that wasn't on the list:) Re:Wheee
rafael on 2002-11-22T20:45:22
Got 16/20 and failed this question too -- also the first question about demography of USA, and the one about El Niño. That's strange, only 15% of French people got this question right. Apparently we're less directly concerned by this than Japan...The fourth question I failed, was, to my shame, the tenth of the survey. I really need to learn to distinguish my left hand from my right hand now.
Re:Wheee
mir on 2002-11-22T21:03:29
I failed that same question. I guess it depends how you count. I am probably counted as Christian, even though I am really an agnostic and so must be a good chunk of the European population.
Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents seems to agree with the survey as well as several other sources I found (even though the figures vary widely).
Counts
rafael on 2002-11-22T22:51:08
Interesting link, thanks. It says also :Which is coherent with my personal observations, at my little scale.Many Muslims (and some non-Muslim) observers claim that there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in the world. Adherents.com has no reason to dispute this. It seems likely, but we would point out that there are different opinions on the matter, and a Muslim may define "practicing" differently than a Christian. In any case, the primary criterion for the rankings on this page is self-identification, which has nothing to do with practice.Another interesting info I found there : Israel seems to be the 4th country that counts the largest percentage of atheists.
I got 17/20. Besides missing the religion-size question as Pudge did, I also mis-placed Sweden and Argentina.
Not that I've ever needed to know the location of either...
Re:How embarasking
jjohn on 2002-11-22T19:40:08
I hope you didn't mistake Sweden for Argentina.
:-) The test choices for Sweden made the question easier for me. If those choices had included Norway and Denmark, I would have been S.O.L. The many Spanish class I took in High School and College acquainted me with Argentina's position in South America. The Falkland War also helped.
How does anyone who has seen a world map not know where the Pacific ocean is? There are only five oceans on Earth and most of the world's population lives on the coasts of three of them. Like Zorknapp, I can't understand how even the most barely educated student would fail to locate his country of origin on a map. This speaks either of youthful nihilism or terminal stupidity.
