Oh my god! I had a girl ask that exact same thing in my science class! What are the odds? :rolleyes:
Feel free to add in the professor’s response when you get around to it HannibalV.
I would like to point out that the a lack of musical knowledge is not any paticular sign of idiocy. I don’t care for music and as a result pay no attention to it.
Because I am a voracious reader I still pick up pieces so I knew most the musical things in this thread, but I probably couldn’t name more than a few Beatles songs, if Gene Simmons weren’t wearing the makeup I probably couldn’t differentiate him from Paul Simon (know some of his music but I have no idea what he looks like), and I didn’t know Rush was a band until a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think anybody would consider me an idiot, I’m just uninterested.
But that said, most of the examples here are amusing (if not surprising.
My example: We have a thing called casual carpool in the Bay Area (essentially people gather at central points and get into whatever car shows up next) and recently I was in a car with a woman who had just moved here from Louisiana and the driver was an immigrant from India. They got talking and she tried to guess where he was from.
Finally he says we is from India and she says: “Your Indian? I’ve got some Indian in me too, I’m Creole we all have some indian in us.” She had no idea that American Indians and India Indians were not the same people.
I won’t even mention the McDonald’s cashier who refused to believe that my $2 bill (for non-Americans: $2 bills are rarely used) was real money.
My freshman year in college, I was talking with some friends in the dorm hallway when one mentioned he was having trouble with his math homework. Since I knew he was in remedial math class (how you get into college without knowing basic math is another thread), I asked what the problem was. His reply?
“greater than and less than symbols. Man, I can never remember which way they point”
After much effort to stifle laughter, I gave him the tip that “the mouth wants to eat the bigger one”
“Wow, that’s a great way to remember it!!” he said.
Yeah, I thought so too when I first heard it, IN SECOND GRADE.
Worst of all? This guy was, according to him, “pre-med” :eek:
No, he didn’t make it back for sophomore year.
OK, so as promised, stupid answers to cultural literacy questions. I was a feature editor in high school, and I did two installments of cultural literacy tests on a total of close to 300 students. Twelve English classes were surveyed, one for each of the three levels on the four grades.
Here are some sample answers to quesitions:
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In what year did the US first land on the moon? 1914, 1989.
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Name two pairs of presidents with the same last name. The Kennedys, George Washington and George Bush.
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Which planet has a great red spot? Juniper, Russia.
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The first ten ammendments to the Constitution are called what? civil rights, liberal rights, the Declaration of Independence.
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These explorers led an 1804 expedition to the Pacific Ocean: Columbus, Lois and Clark (from Superman?)
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What is Mark Twain’s real name? Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer
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Who wrote the Grapes of Wrath? William Shakespeare.
There were a total 30 questions on each test. Only 32 percent scored a passing grade on either test. The average score was 14 points, and one person only managed to answer a single question. This was seven years ago. I weep for the future.
I’ll never forget this one from high school:
“Who won the Civil War; us or the French?”
Another gem from that ill-spent age:
An irate male shrieking: “They’re taking away my rights!”
… when speaking about his right to an abortion.
I had a student who was so sweet, nice, helpful … and completely vacant. Upon hearing a conversation about state governments she turned to me and asked if New Mexico was a state. My incredulous expression did not affect her at all. She continued amusing me by gushing about how much she loved geography.
Later that year we had a presidential election, and during a bit of student discussion about election procedures I ranted on how the press decided the election based on how the East-coast states voted and people in the rest of the country may have stayed home because of it … completely ignoring my statements, she looked up and innocently asked if we were on the East Coast (we’re in Illinois).
Years ago I accidentally insulted some friends of the guy I was dating. One of them had said how they hated Trivial Pursuit (one of my favorite games) because the questions were “absolutely ridiculous”. For instance, one of the questions that so offended him was “What two planets does the asteroid belt lie between? … I mean, who the heck knows that!” I guffawed loudly and announced that it was Mars and Jupiter, followed by a disgusted “duh!”. The whole table went silent and stared at me. I was momentarily oblivious and followed with raising my hand and stating “Who here took 7th grade Science?!” :eek:
Although I continued to date the guy for some time, those particular friends of his never did anything with us again.
Sadly, Ender, the teacher’s response is lost to the mists of history. But I can guess there was a strong degree of stunned silence involved.
About two weeks ago my best friend was telling me about how her and her guy were doing their thing, when the condom dissapeared.
Then she asked me if she could just pee it out. I laughed. Then she asked if she would eventually just shit it out. I laughed harder.
I mean, woah boy.
This was a question in one version of Trivial Pursuit and I believe that it IS true.
Just because an animal walks on four legs doesn’t mean it has four knees.
I was siting in Intro to Psych and we took one of those test were every single answer is false. Anyway, one of the statements was “Masturbation leads to blindness”. A male junior sitting next to me leans towards me and asks “Is this masturbation?” and proceeded to make a hand motion that I care not to describe. How you get to be a 17 year-old male in public school and not know what masturbation is is beyond me.
Oh yeah, the whole Virginia/West Virginia thing. A question I have actually gotten more than once (this isn’t strictly along the lines of the OP, but amusing nonetheless): “Where are you from?” “Virginia.” “Oh, West Virginia?” (Huh? Did you think I forgot to say West?)
A lot of people think that Washington, D.C. is in Washington state.
It’s my own ignorance that always amazes me most.
When I was about 15, I was talking with an acquaintance of mine about one of my favorite actresses, Jean Simmons, and was stunned when he referred to her as male. It took me some time to figure out that he meant * Gene * Simmons, the famous rock star. I had never heard of GS, and I still wouldn’t know him from his fellows if I saw his picture.
There are at least two things people on this board have referred to that I didn’t know about: the International House of Pancakes, and that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was an album rather than a band.
Somebody else referred to the distance from the Earth to the Sun, I have heard the figures 93 and 98 million miles used, and don’t know which is correct (perhaps both, one at apogee and one at perigee?). I guessed the distance from the earth to the moon at 300,000 miles, looked it up on Google, and found it is actually about 234,000 miles.
I watch so little television that I constantly amaze people with what I don’t know. I can name three movies that Lucy Liu has appeared in without even trying, but as I sit here I can’t think what TV show she’s in.
But other people’s ignorance is so much more fun to talk about. . .
During the Gulf War, a girl in my Spanish class patriotically said that we must not let “those Arabs” take over Kuwait. Apparently she didn’t know that the Kuwaitis themselves were Arabs.
I saw a girl on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire who didn’t have even the slightest idea how many centimeters were in an inch. I can understand her not knowing the exact figure, but her choices were 1.5, 2.5, 5.5 and 10.5. Only one was even close, and she still couldn’t get it!
My brother didn’t know who George C. Marshall was. Okay, not everybody’s heard of old George Catlett M, but my sibling had never heard of the Marshall Plan either. That surprised me.
My dad was teaching a lesson about the Bible to some ladies of the community and explained that he would translate some of the Greek New Testament for them. One of the ladies demanded to know why he wasn’t using the “original” English, declaiming, “If English was good enough for Jesus and the apostles, it’s good enough for me!” Maybe she thought King James was a contemporary of Jesus.
A good friend of mine thought that “erstwhile” meant “annoying,” and was unaware that “aren’t” can be pronounced with two syllables.
When I said, “A fool and his money are soon elected,” a co-worker of mine was completely baffled; she had never heard the original phrase that I was spoofing.
A week or two before this past election, another co-worker of mine did not know whether George W. Bush described himself pro-life or pro-choice. (Don’t tear your hair out; she does not live in Florida).
I forget which show this was, but sometime in the last year or so there was something on the tube where the host was trying to show how ignorant people can be (like we need a TV show for this?). He was oing up to people at random and asking them to sign a etition outlawing “women’s sufferage”. Just about everyone he asked signed it! Shocking.
Oh, the joys of the web.
From Triviastic
From FunTrivia
So, final tally: Elephant have four knees, no knees, four knees (but so do camels), and sixteen knees. It really is true that you can find anything on the internet.
I think it was The Man Show on Comedy Central that did the bit with the women’s sufferage.
Oh, I remember a good one:
I overheard a classmate in my freshman comp class saying he needed to format a floppy disk, but didn’t know how.
Ok, I can understand that. I’m long past the point where I expect people to know general computer knowledge.
The problem is, when I came over to help him, I told him to minimize the window he was currently using, and then double click on My Computer, etc.
He looked at me and asked, “Minimize? What’s that mean?”
sigh
Worse was when my Computer Science I professor didn’t know what the colon followed by a number meant in a URL. (Ex. http://www.something.com:80/index.html)
I don’t expect most people to know (or care), but a computer science teacher should know these things.
Search your memory real hard, Hann. Are you sure you just didn’t read about this somewhere?
Up until a few years ago my sister (late 20’s at the time) had never heard of Charles Manson.
I was watching a young guy on Millionare a while back (may have been one of the first shows) and the $100 question was:
Hannibal used these animals to cross the Alps.
A. Elephants
B. LLamas
C. I don’t remember
D. It doesn’t matter
He guessed llamas! I think he was the first contestant to lose on the FIRST question!
The next day at work I was telling several of my co-workers about this “moron” I had seen on tv. Turns out they didn’t know the answer either and then they got mad at me for indirectly calling them morons. :rolleyes:
A coworker stunned me with the following tidbits:
[ul]She didn’t know you could see other planets.
She thought the Sun and Moon were the same size.
She didn’t know stars put out their own light, but thought they reflected it from the Sun.[/ul]
I recently got to explain the meaning of the word “augmented” to a college sophomore majoring in engineering who hates math.
Its not awful, but after I got done saying that it meant they were adding streams together she did the disgusted face, “Well, why didn’t they just say that?” They did, nimwit, and what did you get on your SAT?