The Dumbing of America, revisited.

A friend of mine e-mailed these to me. His source claims they are a compilation of actual student General Competency State Exam (GCSE) answers. In any case, if they are genuine, I fear for these poor people. In any case, my current sig says it all. In any case, most of these are just damn hilarious and I just wanted to share them with you guys.

  1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

  2. The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, “Am I my brother’s son?”

  3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

  4. Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

  5. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

  6. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

  7. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

  8. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.

  9. Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.

  10. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: “Tee hee, Brutus.”

  11. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

  12. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw. Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

  13. In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.

  14. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

  15. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah.”

  16. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.

  17. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William
    Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his
    birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

  18. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

  19. During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.

  20. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was called Pilgrim’s Progress. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

  21. One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still
    dead.

  22. Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

  23. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. His
    mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.

  24. Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy.

  25. Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly
    noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the
    trees.

  26. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.

  27. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

  28. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn’t have any children.

  29. The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.

  30. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practiced virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

  31. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.

  32. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

  33. The First World War, caused by the assignation of the
    Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

Yeah, I was in Junior High School when I learned about the Organ of the Species, but I didn’t master it for years.

PS sorry about the formatting, I just cut and pasted from my e-mail.

I don’t think that’s real - I saw it about six years ago in a newspaper, The Sun, I think. It was supposed to be cutesie - like it came from little children. But most of the comment are the same, and I remember my eight-grade Social Studies brining it to class.

However, I must say that this part…

is pretty damn true for this Sarah. :wink:

I wish I had 700 porcupines.

I feel dummer just fer reeding that.

Holy Typos, Batman!

Should read"

And I remember my eighth-grade Social Studies teacher bringing it to class.

I wasn’t intentionally trying to support Lexicon’s OP, FWIW. :slight_smile:

ROOFLE

… anyway, if these were GCSE answers, shouldn’t this thread be titled “The Dumbing of Britain”?

And i always thought that GCSE stood for General Certificate of Secondary Education.

Shucks, guess i must be dumbed down too!

As far as I can tell, this list (that has been circulating both in newspapers and e-mail for at least a couple of years) was taken word-for-word from a chapter in a book by linguist Richard Lederer. The title is either “Anguished English” or “Even More Anguished English” (I own it, but can’t find it after my recent move, and can’t remember if it’s the original or the sequel.)

I KNOW that this is one of the chapters in Lederer’s book (it’s called, IIRC, “The History of the World According to Student Bloopers”), but what I’m not clear on is attribution. IIRC, Lederer claims to have gathered these HIMSELF from MANY YEARS worth of tests and papers – combining many, many individual “bloopers” (spelling errors and malapropisms) into this humorous flow of history (thus the reason they are, roughly, in choronological order). Interestingly, I DO definitely remember that the chapter in Lederer’s book has a good deal of American history in that chapter – and I’m fairly sure that Lederer himself is American.

So this is not a sign of any dumbing, I fear – at least not in the way it might seem. Rather than a few completely ignorant folks who write idiotic answers like this, this just shows that MOST of us make stupid mistakes like this that could be combined into one list that then will be mis-titled, mis-attributed, and generally mis-used.

Also perhaps of interest: This same book has a chapter on comical statements from court transcripts – which is also circulated on the 'net without attribution. (I believe Lederer gives credit to an association of court reporters for the list he publishes. This is the list that includes things like:
Lawyer to little boy: All your answers must be oral, do you understand?
Little boy: Oral.
Lawyer: All right, where do you live?
Little boy: Oral.)

So the “test answers” are not what they are claimed to be by your friend, but they still are good for a chuckle. :smiley:

No wonder people are less sensitive than they used to be. Does JDT know about this?

When I was in school, I never got to write in funny answers on my standard tests, they were always multiple choice deals which required the use of a #2 pencil.

Some of those are older than Lederer’s book. The Milton one appeared in a flipover joke book called “The Smart Kids/Dumb Parents Joke Book” sometime in the mid-70s. My granddad got it for Christmas one year and I read that thing religiously every time we visited.

[hijack re: Lederer]
For any of you who have Lederer’s The Miracle of Language, there’s a letter by G. K. Ramstrom (p. 147 of the hardback edition) about her experiences in the library of the small town where she grew up. That’s my grandma!
[/hijack]

There is only one porcupine. :smiley:

Franklin & Jefferson: When in the Course of human events,

[Adams, Hancock & Contented Congress choir: Ooo, human events, ooowah]

Franklin & Jefferson: it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,

[Adams, Hancock & Contented Congress choir: I got to leave you now, baby, ooo]

Franklin & Jefferson: and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

[Adams, Hancock & Contented Congress choir: Really hate to leave you now baby…got to get my independence, oooo]

PRNYouth, you’re absolutely right about Richard Lederer and Anguished English - I have this book buried somewhere at home, myself.

The oldest collection of such bloopers I’ve seen was in a book by Art Linkletter called Kids Sure Write Funny, which IIRC was published in the early or mid-1960’s.