Don’t Know Much about Geography

According to National Geographic 30% of Americans (US) between the ages of 18 and 24 who were surveyed could not tell you where the Pacific Ocean is. (Largest body of water in the world.)

The highlights talks about a geography survey.

And there is a 20 Question Geography Survey online.

But it isn’t just geography. It wouldn’t get you a 20/20 if you know where all the countries they asked about are. You have to know about ocean currents messing with the world’s weather, comparative sizes of religions, population of the US… Lots of things that I wouldn’t have called “geography.”

I missed one. It was NOT one of the questions of identifying any country. I did think it was interesting that 3% of Swedish young people were unable to identify Sweden on the map. Unfortunately 11% of US young people were unable to identify the US on a map.

1 thought on “Don’t Know Much about Geography

  1. I missed the first couple of population questions, but none of the geography ones. If the choices had been harder (say, if they had shown the numbers for Sweden, Norway, and Finland as choices for the Sweden question), I might have missed some. But overall if you had any idea what part of the world a country was in, you could make an intelligent guess — which says even more about American schools’ teaching of geography!

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