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US Officials Flunk Test On Civic Knowledge
A test on civic knowledge given to elected officials proved that they are slightly less knowledgeable than the uninformed people who voted them into office. Elected officials scored a 44 percent while ordinary citizens managed an amazing 49 percent on the 33 questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. "It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI. The three branches of government aren't the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria?
Perhaps this is what you are looking for: http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx
Google is your friend....
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx
It is, and here is the breakdown question by question:
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/additional_finding.html
Okay, yeah, people should know the three branches of government and who has the power to declare war. On the other hand, a lot of questions and answers are very vague or misleading. Some examples:
Q: If taxes equal government spending, then:
A: tax per person equals government spending per person
This question tests your grasp of logic or algebra, not civics. For the record, another option is "government debt is zero." This is incorrect because it's the deficit that's zero, not the debt. It's designed to confuse. A knowledgeable person could get this question wrong merely by being careless.
Q: Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than governmentâ(TM)s centralized planning because:
A: the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends
This is not the answer I would have given in a non-multiple choice test. I picked it because it was better than the other options.
Q: Free enterprise or capitalism exists insofar as:
A: individual citizens create, exchange, and control goods and resources
This is just phrased poorly. Why not be clear and ask "What is the definition of capitalism?"
Anyway, of course people should be doing better on this than they are. But it's still a crappy test. And for the record, the "officials" cited aren't exactly Barack Obama and John McCain; they're poll respondents who indicated that they have held elected office at one point. That could include your local dogcatcher, the chairman of your condo association, the head of your PTA, etc.
So don't be too alarmed.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
Vice President Elect Biden is correct. Article I does indeed define the role of the Vice President:
Article I. Section 2:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
Article II merely describes how the Vice President is chosen and the conditions under which the VP may become President (later superseded by Amendment XXV).
FreeSpeech.org
Okay, I got a chance to look at the ISI website, and it is, indeed, a politically conservative organization as I was able to guess from the content of their quiz. One portion of the site is hawking a book about "American Intellectual Conservatism" . Also looking at the mission statement is instructive.
It isn't clear to me whether this is an attempt at a sort of "push polling" as I was speculating or whether they're honestly trying to test what they see as the "important" part of civics, which is strongly colored by their world view. It's probably best to assume the latter. However, if they're not testing based on a wide consensus view of what's important in civics but rather based upon their particular ideological slant then they're not exactly testing peoples' knowledge of civics in a fair sense.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Reread what I said. The word you're looking for is capita, not person. Those do NOT mean the same thing in proper English. Doing something per person means that you did something for each literal human being. Doing something per capita means that you did on average something per person.
The term "capita" refers to an equivalence class of population units in which all people are treated as being equivalent even if the literal individuals that make up the population are not equivalent. Therefore, when you say we spend $1,000 per capita, it means you spend $1,000 on average per person.
By contrast, the term "person" refers to a flesh and blood object. When you say we spend $1,000 per person, you might stretch that terminology to mean that you spent $1,000 per capita. However, a precise interpretation of that phrase is that you spent exactly $1,000 on each person. I'm sure you can understand that those two statements are completely different in their meaning.
Here's an example. I encounter ten homeless people on the side of the road asking for money. If I give $1,000 to one person and nothing else to the other nine people standing there, I gave out $100 per capita within that population of ten people. I'm sure you won't argue that I gave out $100 per person, however. The people who got nothing would beg to disagree with you, as they did not get $100. Okay, after they beat up the tenth guy, they might, but....
The problem is that using the phrase "per person" is ambiguous. It can be interpreted in two different ways---the way you interpreted that statement (as a sloppy way of saying "per capita") and the way I interpreted it (as a logical fallacy that if you spent population * k dollars on a group, this implies you spent k dollars on each member of that group).
Saying "per capita", by contrast, is deliberately unambiguous and can only mean "per average person". There's a reason that people talking about financial matters always say "per capita" and not "per person". To people who are used to precise meanings of terminology like "person" versus "capita", the meaning of those two phrases is completely different. I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people missed that question because by a literal interpretation of the phrase "per person", the "correct" answer is incorrect.
Worse, depending on how you interpret the question, answer A. can also be correct. The question did not specify a time period. If you define the time period of the question to be from the creation of the government up until the present, and if the amount of income equals the amount of money spent during that time period, the debt is provably zero. So by one interpretation, D. is correct, by another interpretation, A. is correct, and by a third interpretation, neither is correct....
See why I object to this question now? Writing good, unambiguous test questions is really hard. This test was pretty well written for the most part, but that question was a real stinker. :-)
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