A quarter hour is 25¢ of an hour so this is correct.
Then there’s the FDR or dime hour, which is 10¢ or one tenth of an hour.
Following on, A Kennedy or 50¢ hour is half of a full hour, usually called an Eisen-hour.
Maybe some, but most of these doofuses seemed to regard the questions as being intellectual questions of the “egghead” variety that were not important in their lives, and seemed to take it as evidence of “normalcy” as opposed to being some sort of geek. Never mind that it involved concepts like the ability to tell time and do basic grade-school level addition and multiplication, or name several countries. One of these idiots, on being told that 3^3, 3x3x3, and 9+9+9, all equalled 27, denied it!
Some of them offered excuses like they were in some other field of study and “weren’t good at math”. Like the woman who claimed she didn’t know what 3x3x3 was because she was studying psychology and not math. Statistical analysis is crucially important in research psychology. Maybe ask this doofus who doesn’t know what 3x3x3 is to define variance and standard deviation, what a t-test is, or the difference between parametric and non-parametric analyses. No luck? Maybe this moron intends instead to become a clinical psychologist – a psychotherapist – which is an even more frightening concept to unleash upon the world!
Just don’t ask them to draw a world map 
What’s most depressing is that this map most probably is more accurate than most Americans would draw it. Which I gather from the students’ answers to “Name three countries other than the USA”.
Definitely.
I haven’t heard younger adults say, quarter past 3 or half past 3 in a long time.
It’s easier to visualize if a person grew up with analog clocks.
But, I’m surprised so many couldn’t divide 60 by 4.
2,080, not subtracting vacation/PTO.
EDIT: That one’s easy to remember because it’s twice as much as 1,040, and we use Form 1040 for filing income tax.
never mind
As sad and depressing as that is, and my eyes are wet from crying for the future generations, it isn’t a new phenomenon. When I was in college back in the 80s we had plenty of idiots. I can still hear one girl asking her boyfriend “Help me remember my social security number!”
And in High School, I remember laughing at the idiot college students we’d read about.
She probably learned geography from Sarah Palin.
https://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/11/report_palin_didnt_know_africa.html
I dont trust most YouTube videos.
Are there any cites?
Yep.
Saturday, Sunday=2, then Mon-Fri=5, then another Sat-Sun. 9 days, five of them workdays.
Smart people quickly figured out that to have any chance of getting on the show or at least in the segment, you have to give a really stupid answer.
Yep, the only reward is giving a dumb answer. Also it is fun to troll pollsters
I would get the “stan” nations all wrong, and likely most of Central America.
I’m really uncomfortable with this sort of thing for exactly that reason. I’m a very intelligent person capable of saying incredibly stupid things, which I am reminded of daily when my son asks me questions I’m pretty sure I learned in grade school. Put me in front of a camera with someone expressly trying to make me look stupid and I don’t have a prayer.
I had a boss in college who was an incredible asshole, who used to ask me random questions to make the point that I was stupider than his nine year old children. I really think this kind of shit is about as mean spirited as he was.
What. The. Fuck. Sad excuse for a human. I really hope you called him out, reported him, or gave him a swift kick in the groin.
The YouTuber is just poking fun at anonymous kids who presumably agreed to appear on video. They’re probably in on the joke and laugh about it with their friends. That’s totally different from your dick of a boss abusing you like that =/
I empathize, but I strongly disagree. I think it’s valid social commentary, particularly at a time when the intellectual capacity of many voters is in question, and the president of the United States that they elected to be their leader has exactly the intellectual capacity of the doofuses that are being ridiculed here.
I agree. This video is a completely different situation, and no, based on what I’ve seen in so many years of lived experience, I don’t think it’s staged, nor do I think that most of it has anything to do with stage fright. Questions like “if you were born 7 years ago, how old would you be today?” are not exercises in deep mathematical or logical analysis!
No, but they are exercises in working memory and I happen to have a pretty significant cognitive deficit in that regard. I would have gotten the question wrong. I know because I did get it wrong, just now. I added 7 to my current age, and only in responding to you did I fully grasp the question, which is clearly designed to elicit that incorrect response from people like me. I’m sorry if you think that makes me stupid, but really what is makes me is a person with executive function difficulties.
“What century…” is also bullshit. I know the Civil War was fought in 1865 but I can never get the rule for calculating the century right. Anyone who struggles with that rule would struggle with this.
Anyway I think anyone in front of a camera when they aren’t expecting it probably loses about 20 IQ points. We can weep for humanity for lots of well-founded reasons but I don’t think I’ll be shedding any tears over a gotcha street game.
I can never even remember what century it is now. The off-by-one thing always gets me.
Why should anyone remember how many sets of 100 years it’s been since a special date of one particular religion… and why is there no year zero but there are negative dates… it’s all arbritary.
I quit with no notice, so that’s something.
The final straw was when he didn’t hire a guy who applied because “customers like women to serve them, not men."
It’s a damn shame. His cafe was hands down the best shawarma wrap in town. After I quit I had fantasies of going back in disguise to eat his food. That was over twenty years ago and I’ve never had a better wrap. Bastard.
Well first of all, I do not and never have regarded you as “stupid”, but very much the opposite. The life challenges at home and work that you’re dealing with so well are far more than I ever could manage, not to mention your fine writing skills.
I’m certainly no expert on how particular cognitive deficits relate to general intelligence, but I will say, again, that the questions that were asked spanned a very broad continuum of cognitive skills, from simple arithmetic, to basic logic, to the most rudimentary knowledge of geography. And, perhaps with some selective editing, we were presented with an astonishing panoply of ignoramuses who were supposedly the best and brightest of our college-educated youth. That is surely worthy of note and somber reflection.
But this is getting far deeper than this light-hearted thread was ever intended to delve.
A couple of years ago I saw a news/political video (I forget the context) that was being mocked and trotted out as “proof” of French’s decline in Montreal. It was one of those “man on the street” videos interviewing a francophone student who had selected to study post-secondary (cégep) in English. This student would be 18-19 years old and did all her schooling in French.
The “reporter” was mostly speaking to her on English, and decided to “quiz" her on her bilingualism with a whole bunch of “give me the French word for X” questions. They were mostly words with pretty similar terms: paper/papier, scissors/ciseaux, gum/gomme.
The guy then throws out “paperclip” and she starts to answer “papier …” and realizes that’s not correct and stops. He keeps repeating the word “come on, you know the word for paperclip, everyone knows paperclip” and not really giving her room to think. She fails to recall the translation.
The answer is trombone. Yes, like the instrument. It doesn’t follow the pattern of the other “quiz” words, and the set up was highly likely to make pretty much any bilingual person stumble because code switching can actually be pretty difficult. But not being able to name a paperclip was being touted as a sign of her stupidity and the decline of French due to English yadda yadda insert Québec language crisis here.
Nevermind she was a teenager who’d just spent 2 years being educated in zoom; I suspect paperclips aren’t very common in her life and probably rarely mentioned.
The whole thing made me so mad.
I regularly stumble on words and say something in either language based on whatever comes to mind first. Often that joggles the memory for the translation, but also most people I speak with are also fluent in Franglais and the conversation just continues.