Even our sitting president got this one wrong once.
Speaking as someone who writes multiple choice questions quite a lot, let me just say that the “28 member states” question is a classic example of a bad question. You’ll not only catch the people who are completely clueless, you’ll also catch people who know the approximate number but assume the question is a trick. The reason one often has people scoring much worse than chance on T/F exams is because the examinee can often come up with a possibly convoluted argument as to why an assertion is wrong.
[quote=“renke, post:150, topic:78330”]
Puerto Rico is a state of the US.[/quote]
Again, I think this is not a good question. “Puerto Ricans are US citizens” would be a better one (and many Americans would still get it wrong). The technical distinction between “state” and “territory” is an important one, but in a T/F context it raises questions about what the actual intent of the question is.
I likewise don’t know if the EU questions are really fair ones in the UK, where the centuries-old tradition of treating the rest of Europe as a qualitatively different entity means they’ve never been acutely aware of the difference between (say) France and Belgium in the same way that the Germans have had to be. The Swiss/EU issue might be part of the daily discourse in continental EU countries, but if it is not as ubiquitous in British media then it isn’t a shock if British people are less aware of it than their counterparts across the channel.
