It’s not only Americans who come up short in the geography department. Semi-retired Bangkok Post columnist Roger Crutchley, an Englishman who has lived in Bangkok for 46 years, noted in this week’s column – Waterloo – Song, Station or Battleground – that in one survey he’d read, one in six Britons “could not pick out the United Kingdom on a world map. One person even pointed to a spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And a quarter did not know 1066 marked the Battle of Hastings.”
He also had this:
**While we are at it, the Brits are not too hot on geography either:
Presenter: Vietnam has borders with Laos, Cambodia and which other country?
Contestant: The US?
Presenter: Which mountain range separates France from Spain?
Contestant: The Himalayas?
Presenter: In which country is Mount Everest?
Contestant: Er … it’s not Scotland is it? (er, no it isn’t).
Presenter: Where is the Sea of Tranquillity?
Contestant: Ibiza?**
Over this business, I always feel that at the time of the USA’s annexing New Mexico and other regions from Mexico in 1848, the US authorities might have foreseen this situation; and accordingly changed the name of the area concerned, to something not involving the word “Mexico”. In all periods of history, there are plenty of people who are not very bright, and are prone to becoming confused and getting the wrong end of the stick !
I suspect the Ibiza tourism board might actually find that offensive… all those years trying to set themselves up as Party Capital of the World and there’s brits (one of Spain’s biggest sources of tourists) who think they are tranquil!
One of my dorm-mates in college was trying to enter Tourism School. She had to do a multiple choice test; the questions were take-home, so we got to review them with her. One of the questions was which countries did Andorra have borders with - she’d picked one of the wrong choices.
She was from Andorra :smack: Girl could speak five languages at the native level, but geography was clearly not her best subject.
Some people struggle with spatial relationships and directions. Things like what your country borders, or whether it’s north or south to a particular destination, are very difficult for some people to grasp. Maybe it’s a learning disability.
Yup. I’m in GIS and some folks just don’t think spatially. Not sure I would call it a disability though.
Geography itself can contribute to this. I grew up in areas where the streets and roads for the most part where organized in a NSEW grid pattern. I often give directions using these cardinals.
My wife grew up in Pittsburgh. NSEW for directions is not very useful there. You need to direct using right turn left turn.
I can list the state capitals. I can locate Honduras on a map. I can identify at least several of the constituent states of the former Soviet Union. I know which continent is Africa.
The one thing I can not understand - at least not without an actual globe right in front of me - is how Portugal winds up being closer to the East Coast than Ireland, or how the shortest route from New York to Paris takes you over Canada.
My four year old has been enjoying Geopuzzles since he was two. They’re jigsaw puzzles, one for each continent, where the pieces are mainly individual countries. (Unfortunately, he’s forgotten a lot of what he learned a year or two ago. Perhaps there is a certain stage of cognitive development after which names, shapes, and relatives locations tend to “stick.”)
I (and a lot of friends I have talked to from the wide-open plains of the midwest US ) were rather surprised to see how small most of the countries of Europe are.
Partly this comes from our geography classes – all the country maps seemed to fit nicely on a standard page – the USA, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, etc. So unconsciously we thought they were all about the same size. It’s startling to realize that France, so involved in history, is really about the size of Minnesota & the Dakotas.