They are only terrorists when they are armed.
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I would be a disappointment to geography teachers everywhere if i were forced to draw anything on a map. Hell i’m not sure i can draw Colorado right!*
*joking, i know it’s a rectangle.
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Not surprised. I will forever recall one of my science profs giving our mostly freshman class her annual map test, out of some kind of masochistic impulse. Most of the class at this highly selective university couldn’t find Turkey – Turkey! – on the map, a result that the prof noted was very normal.
American public K-12 schools just do a horrible job at teaching geography, history and civics. Also, a lot of households don’t have an atlas or globe that would allow young children to explore. Then there’s the provincialism that’s part of the reason why only 46% of Americans hold a valid passport.
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Although the actual percentage of correct answers is dismal, as Hank Green points out, this is a terrible graphic for showing the data. All you can compare in the graphic is the area covered by dots in North Korea and the area covered by dots outside, which pretty clearly under-represents the number of correct answers (bad thought it may be).
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Not exactly:
/pedant
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Geographic ignorance is hardly a function of American exceptionalism: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2586028/Britons-bad-geography-revealed-74-Britons-Greece-map.html
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ftfy. When Barnum was in the UK he had to extend the boundaries of his region of unintelligence. Mark Twain’s story of how Barnum persuaded the British public to take an interest in its own historic places may have been improved in the telling but is still a classic.
I’m actually not surprised. That whole region including the Balkans and Asia Minor is a geographical nightmare. I had an utter lack of interest in geography at school and, to be honest, didn’t take much notice of anything outside England/France/Germany/Switzerland till my company suddenly seemed to want to give me Delhi belly or Montezuma’s revenge in every continent where there was an airport.
Now, the fact that 52% of the people who I have to share this country with seem to think that Europe, the US and China are small islands surrounding the continent of Great Britain - that’s concerning.
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Perhaps. Given a high enough requirement of fidelity or detail no one would be able to draw any geographic location accurately. But for drawing the general shape of a location by hand i would use a rectangle for Colorado 
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I’m not surprised anymore after seeing surveys like this over the past decades, but at the time I was shocked. I wasn’t expecting anyone (myself included) to find Burkino Faso, but I just assumed that anyone who could get into university would be able to identify Turkey on a world map.
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If you’re not American, a Yankee is American.
If you’re American, a Yankee is a Northerner.
If you’re a Northerner, a Yankee is a Northerner from the East Coast.
If you’re on the East Coast, a Yankee is a New Englander.
If you’re a New Englander, a Yankee is someone from a small quaint village in rural northern New England, where they tap their own maple syrup and charge you out the nose for Bed and Breakfast.
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Damn Yankees!
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I’ve long thought New Jersey should be moved to where it belongs, next to Alabama.
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Don’t forget the scented Yankee Candles on the bedside tables there.
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Um, a number closer to 0% than to 10%, would be my guess. 90% would probably say North is Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s daughter.
Exactly. I’m old enough to have children in college, and I barely remember Iran Contra. This would be ancient history to Millennials and Generation Z.
Also, only 53% of those with post-graduate degrees could locate North Korea on a map?!??!!! Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell?! No wonder we elected Donald Trump. Idiocracy is real.
That’s because the concept of a liberal arts education is dead. We’re not interested in learning how to learn, just learning how to get a good job.* I have talked to many young men who are pursuing engineering degrees and who think “hurr durr art history majors”, as if art history majors were actually literally planning to work in an art history factory. They don’t get it. If I’d applied that same mindset to my own education, I’d have been put out to pasture long ago. Most of the stuff I see in job postings (especially computer related) wasn’t even invented yet when I was in college.
*Connections, mostly, and not making a complete ass out of yourself in the interview. If you have an in, and present yourself as competent, you can get a good job, college be damned. I have worked with computer people who didn’t have a CS degree, and sometimes who didn’t have any kind of degree. The people who say COLLEGE IS JUST THERE FOR JOBS are dead wrong. Dead dead wrong.
/rant over. Now get off my lawn.
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Yankee Candles are for poseurs. Real Yankees make their own candles, and their own honey, because they keep their own apiaries.
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Was that on a map that showed only the shapes of the land and water, or on a map that had national borders drawn on it as well? I remember reading that people tend to do much more poorly on tests like this with unlabeled maps that have no border lines drawn on them compared to maps that have border lines.
Um, Turkey is pretty much the only country in Asia Minor, which is the lobe of land between the Med and the Black sea to the east of the strait that connects the two. I would agree that sussing out the Eastern European countries to the West of that strait, the mid eastern countries to the southeast of Turkey, or the ex-soviet states to the north and east of Turkey are all quite a bit harder.
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Because screw Canada, that’s why!
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Few Americans could find North Korea with both hands.
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North Korea is easy to find. But as an American I would be hard pressed to tell you Uzbekistan from Kyrgyzstan.
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