Your states = subdivision of country
Our counties = subdivision of country
Your counties = more like UK local authority/council areas.
There are fewer (Doh! Quite a lot more) UK counties than US states.
Equivalence is still fair, I feel.
ETA accuracy
It is, but this article itself is extending the lazy journalism by one meta-level. Oh the humanity!
(Written from either that country that’s got all the bushfires at the moment or some country near Germany, I forget which.)
Ah, got it.
I’m really curious of the condition of this poll, was it made quickly on the street, throwing questions at the face of random people ?
Was it online or at an office ?
Where the questions misleading ?
Was it the 120th question of an exhausting poll ?
There is a lot of way to make bad polls, on purpose of by accident.
I doubt that many of the Australians who have been to Bali could find Bali on a map, or even tell you what country it is in.
82% 4:59
I suck.
Me thinks you judge yourself to harshly. You were right about where I started. Run it a few more times and you’ll find yourself in the mid 90’s
I have spent too much time there to fail that one. Both sides of the Solway Firth were effectively my childhood home. I had elderly relatives in Castle Douglas. My grandma lived at Castle Kennedy for a while, which is actually in Wigtownshire, but if you don’t know where Kirkcudbrightshire is then you won’t know where that is either.
My international geography was also better than most peoples, but that was because my dad was an engineer on merchant ships and I had a map on my bedroom wall with postcards connected to where they were sent from with string.
Judging from your past contributions here on BB you are clearly, I am glad to observe, not ‘most Brits’. 
That’s kind of unfair, given that it hasn’t been used as a division of local government since 1973.
I do not think USians ought to know all our divisions of local government any more than UKians out to know US ones.
The shire counties are something different. But I’ll concede that Kircudbrightshire is very much an outlier. I doubt any greater number would be able to locate Lincolnshire or many of the more familiar UK shire counties (they might at least have heard of it).
But this is all arcane quibbling - my point was to respond to @Franko to suggest that perhaps suggesting an equivalence between US people not knowing where major countries in the news are located and UK people not knowing where US states might be, was a false equivalence and a better one would be US states and UK counties. I grant that this is hardly equivalent either.
Oh man, I hope the second version of this thread is about people on Facebook not knowing how to evaluate chained binary arithmetic operators using PEMDAS rules!
Geography is distinct from that in that it has a few categories of knowledge: exact shapes, exact locations relative to other countries, vague knowledge of regions, and knowledge of continents and the countries contained therein.
There are tons of countries I know the exact location of without fail, but others I only know more vague approximations of where they are. And who gets to decide which ones are the most important? I would guess that my African geographic knowledge is a bit worse than other continents for example, but if you are from Africa you might not necessarily give a rip about US political imbroglios in various regions.
Since the concept of a nation is a social convention that occurs within temporal regions, if you add historical nations into the mix, it gets even more dicy. For example, I grew up with two globes: a modern one and one from the 40s or 50s and occasionally would get them mixed due to the additional cognitive load of tracking two temporal state “snapshots.”
Back to PEMDAS, how many people just happen to be clued into mnemonics vs having knowledge of why such an order of precedence was determined? Is memorization of facts intelligence?
Because people interested in the Iran issues, including the placing of the Shah on the throne, might find this book very interesting, I recommend the book Kingmakers: The Making of the Modern Middle East
If Morning Consult wanted to shed some useful light, it could focus less on the geographic location of Iran and more on why the US and Iran have been at odds ever since the CIA and Britain’s MI6 overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and installed a murderous and corrupt tyrant…
Agree. The “what happens” is mulch more important than the “where.”
If you really want to see how well people know Britain, ask them what the biggest city in the country is.
Answer: Carlisle (1,039.31 km^2 or 401.28 sq mi)
No, humans may not change but the general level of education varies widely.
I don’t know why this question is being labeled as bad journalism or that the internet is being blamed for the outcome. It’s as if some of you may not have heard this accusation before? You can be sure it predates the internet by as long as you want to look back (very nearly). Part of the reason is education, part is that US interest is very introverted.
OTOH it also comes down to where you think your place is in the world. And if you think that “the world” is your suburb, it does kinda stunt your thinking.
As an aside, a funny thing happened the other week. I was at my local Pho restaurant for some takeaway and the guy and his missus in front of me were ordering Pad Thai - which made me laugh - because the staff were all Viets and everything on the menu was Vietnamese dishes - and Pad Thai was not among them. The bloke was non-plussed to be told that they didn’t have that dish but that such-and-such was very like it. I saw him look at the menu board and say “Now I’m confused”. He was a bit thick and presumably thought that all Asian were the same brand. After I ordered he said “What did you get mate?” I said “special fried rice” - so that’s what he ordered too. It’s like the effort of thinking was too much. I guess that’s why they have photo’s of the food. Now bone up on those maps chaps.
Actually no, not at all. You could probably draw a perfect Venn diagram of Geographical knowledge/General knowledge — Geographical ignorance/General ignorance. But you got your GIF in there.
Haha, looks like someone couldn’t find Iran on a map!
flawless logic 10/10 analogy skills
Also - does the unlabeled map have borders drawn in? I can label the 50 states on a map with borders, but couldn’t draw the borders from memory. In school I once had to memorize the maps of Central and South America as well as Europe, countries and capitals, but again only on maps with borders drawn.
Also, while knowing the names and capitals of countries has been useful (and not knowing them, embarrassing) to me, knowing specific locations never has, except when traveling, and for that I can look at a map.
Then again, I have horrible direction sense everywhere. I can’t even reliably label the towns in and near the county where I live now or where I grew up and frequently can’t remember what roads go where. This makes it a bad idea for me to become a cab driver, and sometimes makes me look silly but otherwise hasn’t held me back. It feels like that just isn’t how my brain organizes information.
