Tapsearch Com EditorTest your American civic literacy
September 19th 2007 22:12
For the record, I got a 90 percent on the civics quiz the NRO people are all talking about. They always call their mistakes "mortifying" or "careless" or whatever, but I'm not making excuses. I didn't know, or didn't know well, those six topics.
Don't read this until you've taken the test (if you want to):
--I wasn't sure whether Congress could receive ambassadors, or if they technically got to "approve" treaties. (No and yes.)
--I remembered that the Monroe Doctrine had something to do with America wanting to have control of the surrounding area in some way, but I confused it with Manifest Destiny. It was the desire that no other European powers take colonies in the Western Hemisphere.
--For whatever reason, I managed to graduate college with a polisci major without knowing what just-war theory was.
--OK, this is a little embarrassing. I forgot the Bay of Pigs was before the Cuban Missile Crisis, not after.
--I'll actually make an excuse for my answer about real income by class. There's been a big deal in the media about how real income has been declining for the past so-many decades for this-or-that group of people. The question asked about "households" for 40 years. During that time, income has increased for households in all classes.
That's a pretty obscure question. It demands you not only know that real income has been declining, but that it hasn't been declining long enough on the household level to make the last 40 years a net loss. Men's incomes specifically have been. Besides, it's a horrible measure of how well people are living, anyway -- even as "real" median income declines, people have more and more stuff.
--And like everyone, I got the banking question wrong.
UPDATE: Jeremy Lott gets a 95, but that doesn't count because he just wrote a book about American history. Two of his mistakes, of course, were "should-have-been-obvious."
Don't read this until you've taken the test (if you want to):
--I wasn't sure whether Congress could receive ambassadors, or if they technically got to "approve" treaties. (No and yes.)
--I remembered that the Monroe Doctrine had something to do with America wanting to have control of the surrounding area in some way, but I confused it with Manifest Destiny. It was the desire that no other European powers take colonies in the Western Hemisphere.
--For whatever reason, I managed to graduate college with a polisci major without knowing what just-war theory was.
--OK, this is a little embarrassing. I forgot the Bay of Pigs was before the Cuban Missile Crisis, not after.
--I'll actually make an excuse for my answer about real income by class. There's been a big deal in the media about how real income has been declining for the past so-many decades for this-or-that group of people. The question asked about "households" for 40 years. During that time, income has increased for households in all classes.
That's a pretty obscure question. It demands you not only know that real income has been declining, but that it hasn't been declining long enough on the household level to make the last 40 years a net loss. Men's incomes specifically have been. Besides, it's a horrible measure of how well people are living, anyway -- even as "real" median income declines, people have more and more stuff.
--And like everyone, I got the banking question wrong.
UPDATE: Jeremy Lott gets a 95, but that doesn't count because he just wrote a book about American history. Two of his mistakes, of course, were "should-have-been-obvious."
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