{"id":141,"date":"2008-01-06T05:59:19","date_gmt":"2008-01-06T09:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/01\/graph_americans_lost_on_map\/"},"modified":"2008-03-22T22:08:12","modified_gmt":"2008-03-23T02:08:12","slug":"graph_americans_lost_on_map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/01\/graph_americans_lost_on_map\/","title":{"rendered":"Survey: Americans lost on the map"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>From MESH Admin<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy surveyed geographic knowledge of 18- to 24-year-olds across the United States. (The full report is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/roper2006\/findings.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.) Respondents were shown a blank political map of the Middle East and asked to identify four countries: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These were the results:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/files\/2008\/01\/illiteracy.png\" align=\"bottom\" height=\"376\" width=\"498\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The report comments:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> On average, young Americans can find one (1.3) of these four countries.  Fourteen percent can point out all four countries correctly, while 44% cannot find any of them.<\/p>\n<p>After three years of war in Iraq, only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq; 63% cannot. As many can\u2014and cannot\u2014identify Saudi Arabia. The result is even worse for Iran and Israel. Only one in four can find Iran (26%) or Israel (25%). Three-quarters cannot find these two countries.  Overall, up to one in five say they &#8220;don&#8217;t know&#8221; where these four countries are located (ranging from 16% for Iraq to 20% for Iran).<\/p>\n<p>Education makes a difference in young adults&#8217; ability to locate these four countries in the headlines: young Americans with college experience (1.6 correct answers on average) are more likely than those with up to a high school education (0.9 correct) to locate these countries. That said, even the more educated group fares relatively poorly, with less than a quarter of those with a college education able to find all four countries (23%, 6% of those with up to a high school diploma).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From MESH Admin The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy surveyed geographic knowledge of 18- to 24-year-olds across the United States. (The full report is here.) Respondents were shown a blank political map of the Middle East and asked to identify four countries: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These were the results:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1873,1910],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-maps"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}