Can you do better than 7th graders? Try these questions

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Last week I was doing field testing for several 5th and 7th grade standarized questions- in other words before they use the question to “count” they have 500 kids answer it while doing other questions during testing, and we evaluate the question to note common trends in answers- and two of them given to 7th graders made me wonder how adults would answer them. One of the questions we recomended never be given to the kids at the 7th grade level. The other we got 80% of with major errors (and we can’t quite figure out why.)

Give the questions a try. Please note you can’t ask for clarification on the directions because the kids couldn’t. If you try them I’ll let you know how well you do.

  1. Rewrite the following sentence using proper capitilization.
    ** the mississippi river travels north to south but does not go through the state of georgia. **
  2. What are 4 differences between a dictionary and a thesaurus? Explain your answer.
2

  1. The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.

  2. a. A dictionary contains definitions. A thesaurus contains only synonyms, and occasionally antonyms.
    b. There are more entries in a dictionary, because there are words in a dictionary that do not have synonyms.
    c. A dictionary can show you how to say and use a word. A thesaurus just gives you the word.
    d. Dictionary starts with a D. Thesaurus starts with a T.

3
  1. Rewrite the following sentence using proper capitilization.
    ** the mississippi river travels north to south but does not go through the state of georgia. **
  2. What are 4 differences between a dictionary and a thesaurus? Explain your answer.
    **
    [/QUOTE]

The Mississipi river travels north to south, but does not go through the state of Georgia.

(I have seen River Thames used in UK newspapers. I would say Georgia State if discussing say a University).

a) A dictionary defines meanings; a thesaurus gives alternative choices of words with similar meanings.
b) A dictionary is in alphabetical order; a thesaurus is first divided into categories
c) You need to know the word you want to look up in a dictionary; you don’t know the word you want to find in a thesaurus
d) A dictionary is for accuracy; a thesaurus is for style

4

*1. Rewrite the following sentence using proper capitilization.

the mississippi river travels north to south but does not go through the state of georgia.

  1. What are 4 differences between a dictionary and a thesaurus? Explain your answer. *

  2. The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.

  3. a. A dictionary explains the meaning of individual words. A thesaurus gives you others words to use instead of the word you looked up, which often doesn’t constitute much of an explanation.

b. A thesaurus will not provide a pronunciation guide, whereas the dictionary generallly will.

c. A thesaurus will not provide an etymology explaining the origins of the word, but a dictionary generally will.

d. A thesaurus will generally consist of a subset of our vocabulary, of words of a moderate complexity and their synonyms, whereas a dictionary will generally include a much wider variety of words, including very simply words such as conjunctions and pronouns that you would not find in a thesaurus.

5

The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the State of Georgia.

  1. A dictionary gives you a definition; a thesaurus gives similar words.

  2. Roget is not known for a dictionary and Oxford not for its thesaurus.

  3. A thesaurus will not tell you how to pronounce something.

  4. A dictionary is longer.

6
  1. The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.
  2. What are 4 differences between a dictionary and a thesaurus? Explain your answer.
    [list=1]
    [li]Dictionary defines, thesaurus presents synonyms.[/li][li]Dictionary presents etymology, thesaurus does not.[/li][li]Dictionary has pronunciation, thesaurus does not.[/li][li]Dictionary rhymes with canary, whereas thesaurus rhymes with brontosaurus.[/li][/list=1]

Now off to read the other posts! :slight_smile:

7

I live in the city of Poughkeepsie (that is, the city that is called Poughkeepsie), but the woman down the block is mayor of the City of Poughkeepsie (that is, a governmental unit). The City of Poughkeepsie offers limited bus service, but some long-distance buses travel through the city of Poughkeepsie. Ah, but they could also travel through the City of Poughkeepsie, if we wish to emphasize the governmental unit for some reason (“I can’t take that bus; it goes through the City of Poughkeepsie, where I am a wanted man”). To capitalize indicates a governmental “official” use of the word.

So both “State” and “state” in your first question could be accurate, depending on exactly what shade of meaning you would wish to convey. To write

...the State of Georgia

emphasizes that the river passes through a political zone, which you might want to specify if the context involves, oh, states which tax river-transported goods, or if the State of Georgia lays claim to all the water in all its rivers. As in, “…but not through the State of Georgia. Which is just as well, because Georgia recently passed a law requiring factories to discharge their untreated waste directly into its rivers.”

On the other hand, writing

...the state of Georgia

emphasizes the geographic location. It says simply that the river does not flow through the particular geographic region we call Georgia. Based on the sentence, that seems more likely to be the meaning. Still, more likely doesn’t mean certainly…

I’d drop the question. Standardized tests, to measure what they are supposed to measure, shouldn’t allow any wiggle room at all; this question is just a little too ambiguous for comfort.

8

Oh, by the way, do we get extra credit for pointing out that the word is spelled

capitalization

and not

capitilization?

Technically, none of the words ought to be capitilized…only capitalized, which may or may not be very different :smiley:

9

  1. The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.

  2. a. A dictionary explains the meaning of a word, whereas a thesaurus lists synonyms.
    b. A thesaurus does not list part of speech, but a dictionary does.
    c. A dictionary often lists abnormal pluralizations and conjugations, and a thesaurus does not.
    d. A dictionary tries to include all commonly used words in a language, and a thesaurus is mostly limited to nouns, verbs, and adjectives that have several synonyms.

10

I won’t have time to tell you how you’re each doing until I get home this afternoon, but here’s how the group is doing on a whole. Bear in mind the state tells us exactly how to grade the questions, not that we’re thrilled with the guidelines :slight_smile:

The first question is worth 2 points. Everyone has gotten a 1 or 2 so far. Extra points will be awarded for the first person to correctly guess which mistake 80% of the kids made while answering this question.

The second question is worth 4 points. Most people have gotten a 2, and one has gotten a 3. This is how most of the 7th graders did as well.

Anyone else want to give them a shot?

11

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by elfkin477 *
**

  1. Rewrite the following sentence using proper capitilization.
    ** the mississippi river travels north to south but does not go through the state of georgia. ****

[QUOTE]

The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the State of Georgia.

(Mmmmm. State or state? I think I’m wrong on this one, but I feel compelled to capitalize State in this instance to differentiate between the geographic state and a state of being.)

  1. A dictionary contains definitions, a thesaurus contains
    alternate word choices.

  2. A thesaurus does not include pronunciation guidance, a
    dictionary does.

  3. A thesaurus does not include etymology, a dictionary
    does.

  4. A dictionary is intended to include all words in usage,
    a thesaurus includes nouns, verbs, adjectives and ad-
    verbs which have synonyms.

(5. To use a dictionary, you have to know the word that you
are looking for. To use a thesaurus, you do not.)
Yes, I am weasling by putting in five answers instead of four. I fully expect to be disqualified!

As for which part of the first question the kids got wrong, I’m going to guess that they capitalized North and South.

12

My thoughts on your test questions:

Question 1 is semi-ok. Though the capitalization of “state” does depend on context, most style manuals recommend lowercase for this apparent usage.

Question 2 is downright awful. There are a huge number of possible answers, and how can any one answer be “more” correct than another? Questions such as this should never be on a test, especially one given to 7th graders, unless the grading policy is so lax as to accept almost any response. You might as well ask “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Which one is it? Explain your answer.”

Whoever approved this question should be fired and immediately reassigned to the food service industry. I suggest changing it to a multiple-choice question.

13

I gotta agree with what hardcore said. That’s downright crap-o-riffic.

14

I bet most kids capitalize North and South.

Four differences:

A dictionary lists definitions, a thesaurus synonyms.

A dictionary (generally) has a single section of definitions, whereas a thesaurus has two sections, those being the index and the lists of words.

A dictionary has guide words on the top outside corners of the pages. A thesaurus has section numbers on the top outside corners of the pages.

A dictionary’s organization is alphabetic, without regard to concepts or meanings. A thesaurus is organized by meanings and concepts, without regard to alphabetization.

I’d have to agree that this is a bad question. I’ve seen thesauruses that are organized alphabetically, rather than by meaning. I’ve also seen dictionaries that don’t provide definitions. (spelling dictionaries) The answers to a test question should be always right or always wrong, not just most of the time.

15

“The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.” I’m guessing the biggest error was failure to capitalize “river.”

  1. A dictionary contains definitions, while a thesaurus contains synonyms and sometimes antonyms.
  2. A dictionary is useful when you know a word; a thesaurus is useful when you do not know a word.
  3. A dictionary is organized alphabetically while a thesaurus often is not.
  4. A thesaurus usually has an index and a dictionary does not.
16

I’m posting before reading anyone else’s answers, so here goes:

  1. The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.

  2. A dictionary is used to define a word, give it’s proper usage, proper pronunciation, and etymology; whereas a thesaurus gives you synonyms and antonyms for a word.

17

That was my guess too.

Maybe I’m being too pedantic, but I’m afraid I can’t see north to south as being grammatically standard here, even though I have no trouble understanding what they mean. As an adverb, north means “toward the north pole” (or capitalized N.P., if you prefer). It makes more sense to me to say “from [the] north to [the] south” where n. and s. are nouns. But this would invite arguments in favor of capitalization (as in “the North fought the South in the Civil War”). It seems to me it would also be acceptable to use the hyphenated form north-to-south where n. and s. are still nouns but the compound is an adverb. As an example, in “The priest served his parishioners cradle-to-grave”, c.-to-g. is an adverb.

Question two has a huge number of right answers, but I strongly suspect the state would accept only a tiny fraction of them as “correct”. I honestly have to wonder whether a professional lexicographer would receive full credit.

Standardized state tests are often very badly designed. A particularly bad one was New York State’s Regents Exam in physics that I took in the late 80s. By long experience with practice tests, I learned to give the answers they wanted rather than the right answers.

18

  1. Rewrite the following sentence using proper capitilization. **
    The Mississippi River travels north to south but does not go through the state of Georgia.
    **

  2. What are 4 differences between a dictionary and a thesaurus? Explain your answer. [list]*
    [li]A dictionary has definitions and also etymological origins for each word and word type.[/li][li]A thesaurus contains words and their synonyms, along with what type of word it is, such as a noun, verb, etc.[/li][li]Antonyms for a word are not found in a dictionary listed under the specific word.[/li][]Dictionaries generally include pictorial examples of some of the definitions, whereas thesauruses don’t.

19

The Mississippi River travels from north to south, but not through the state of Georgia.

As for the dictionary/thesaurus question, it’s pretty difficult to come up with any unqualified distinctions; there are too many things that are generally called dictionaries, and several varieties of thesauri[sup]*[/sup]. So the differences need to be prefaced with “generally”, or “most”, or “what most people immediately think of”, which is pretty poor for a test question.

The only obvious distinction is trivial, that of the words themselves (they’re spelled differently, one’s Greek & the other’s Latin, different number of syllables, etc.)

There’s also the trivial distinction of who’s known for publishing either, like Webster’s Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus.

Most dictionaries are arranged alphabetically; most thesauri are arranged topically, with perhaps an alphabetical index of keywords.

Many thesauri contain antonyms of words as well as synonyms, which most dictionaries do not, although many dictionaries do contain synonyms.

Most dictionaries contain an entry for every word in them, most thesauri are not as comprehensive.

What many people think of immediately upon hearing the word dictionary contains definitions, etymology, etc. of the words in them, which almost no thesauri contain. However, there are at least as many dictionaries that contain no definitions (foreign language dictionaries, for example).

So far, that’s all I can think of.

  • : I’m using this because thesauruses is awkward, and thesauri is short and a generally acceptable plural. Plus, I like the word.
20

I want to change my answer…

A dictionary maps words to concepts.
A thesaurus maps concepts to words.

It’s a pleasantly concise and geeky answer.

Speaking of which, I recently saw a “flip” dictionary. You could look up concepts, and it would list appropriate words. I guess it’s for folks who’ve never heard of thesauri.