Oh, My...

We have a house guest with us at the moment, and she (who shall remain unnamed) has a favorite television show: Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th-Grader? Our guest asked me to watch this show with her, and because I love her dearly, I agreed to subject myself to 60 minutes of commercial television – something I haven't done for about 10 or 12 years.

The premise of this show is that an adult contestant is asked a series of up to 11 questions that are at (or below!) a fifth grade educational level. Each time they answer a question correctly, they win the next level of prize – up to one million dollars if they get all the questions right. There are some additional rules, all of which serve to help the contestant – basically, all ways to cheat with the help of a fifth grade “helper” kid. In addition, the contestant can bail out at any time and keep whatever prize they've won so far. In other words, the whole thing is rigged in favor of the contestant.

In the show that I watched, there were two contestants. Both of them bailed out at some point – the money that they'd won apparently wasn't worth risking on these terribly difficult questions:

How many months have 31 days in them?

If y=3x and 3x=12, then what is y equal to?

What U.S. President's face appears on the nickel?

What was President Taylor's first name?

If the diameter of a circle is 4 inches, what is its radius?

True or false: the U.S. is in the Eastern Hemisphere?

What continent is the only one that is also a country?

The above are just a representative sample of the questions asked on the show; I didn't try to transcribe them all. The contestants appeared to find these questions challenging, and on several occasions they relied on the rules to allow their helper kid to answer for them (correctly , in each case). The last question above caused one contestant to bail out – after she correctly enumerated all the continents out loud, but then said that each one of them was a country!

Oh, my.

Part of me is unsurprised by this. Over the years I have seen many examples of profound ignorance of nearly everything, mainly in co-workers at places I worked. Let me hasten to add that certainly not everybody I worked with fell into that category – just that there were more than a few of them.

But part of me is surprised – I have trouble believing that apparently functioning adults can't answer certain questions easily (like that simple algebra question), and I'm especially surprised that people who find such questions challenging themselves (like my house guest) are entertained by watching other challenged people. I'd be slinking around in shame, and doing some immediate remedial studying...

And then the ponder: I wonder what would happen if the adult contestants for this show were taken from other countries – China, India, England, or even Estonia? The pattern of results would be most interesting. Based on my personal knowledge of their educational systems, my guess would be that the countries of the former Soviet Union and most of Asia (including India) would produce contestants that would make the U.S. contestants look like chumps...