Re: OT: baloney and cheese

You really must tell us how it went.  It'll be like Jay Leno but without the
camera.  And I lost my faith in the level of informative-ness demonstrated
by anyone in the United States the day I read about the survey of American
high school seniors who were unable to correctly place the US Civil War in
the correct *century* (or tie the war with the correct US president).  I
don't expect everyone to know where Lithuania is (as a point of fact, not
only did NO ONE in my geography class -- apart from the three other people
who worked on my final project with me and the teacher himself -- know where
Lithuania was, fully a third were unsure whether it was a country or not),
or to remember all the names of the Presidents from McKinnley forward (even
I have trouble with everyone between JQ Adams and Lincoln, and then again
from Grant to McKinnley, and I'm a US History major) but come ON.  The wars
are kind of obvious, and it wasn't even a hard war.  Not that there are that
many... I mean, the War of 1812 is more or less self-explanatory.

Anyhow, I have no faith in the American public.  So, we'll see.

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
lloannna@surfside.net
http://www.geocities.com/lloannna.geo
http://lloannna.blogspot.com

"I will not turn into a snake. It never helps." -- Rules for the Evil
Overlord

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Joe Fatula
>
> While I think there may be many Americans who know as little about
> Switzerland as this, I doubt it's nearly as bad as you say.  But not being
> every American myself, in fact, being less than 1 millionth of a
> percent of
> them, I don't really know for sure.  So this weekend, I'm going
> to ask some
> of the people I meet the following questions:
>
> 1) What country is something Swiss from?
> 2) Is Switzerland a real country?
> 3) Where is Switzerland?  (on a map without labels)
>
> I'm going to pick more or less random people, and I think I'll
> get a pretty
> good cross section of Americans.  I'll let you know how it turns out.  My
> initial guess is that everyone I talk to will answer #1 and #2 correctly,
> but perhaps a third of them won't be able to find it on a map.  Maybe more
> than that many, but the first two seem perfectly obvious.
> ---
>
---
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