… can of course easily be applied to, well, everyone basically.
I found this Gallup poll (via Scalzi) that shows various response numbers to several different scientific and general knowledge questions.
The fact that one subheading says “Four out of Five Americans Know Earth Revolves Around Sun” is actually a funny way of glossing over the fact that 20% don’t know that fact! There’s also the usual remarkable lack of knowledge that some Americans have of their own history (only 76% of the Americans surveyed could name that their country obtained independence from Britain!)
But it goes all ways — for that question about the earth revolving around the sun, Brits and Germans were even worse … only 74% of Germans and 67% of Brits surveyed got that question right. So Americans were smarter … or I just hope the surveys are targeting really dumb people.
Honestly, I think many of us would be surprised just how low the general level of education is in the supposedly sophisticated western world. People just don’t know that much beyond the basics they need to get by. Makes me feel good about cultivating such a wide range of general knowledge, that’s for sure.
And while there were no figures available for Australia in such as survey, I’m quite certain we’d get similar figures here …