Wednesday 29 February 2012

citizenship

I just took a US Citizenship test at www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0104/Could-you-pass-a-US-citizenship-test
Yes, I passed. I'm ashamed to say I missed 5 or so of the 96 questions, as most were pretty basic (which ocean is on the East coast?). I missed the term lengths of Senators and Representatives, and who wrote the Federalist papers; I don't remember what else.

But it bugged me that some of the questions were simply wrong. The answers were more along the lines of what you are taught in Elementary school than what you'd find if you actually study history. For instance, they asked what did the Emancipation Proclamation do, with the correct answer of "freed slaves." Well, that was the general idea behind it, but it actually did nothing, as the President of the Union declared that slavery was illegal in the Confederate States (over which he had no control at the time). At least the wording on another question was more correct, when they asked what was one issue that led to the civil war (the answer being slavery), rather than what caused it.

But anyway...

4 comments:

Wil said...

Maybe I'll take that test when I have time, just to see how messed up it is. :-)

Of course, the issue with the Emancipation Thingie is that the Union hadn't legally recognized that the Confederacy was a separate nation, so legally (in the Union's point of view) it did have the effect.

I suppose it's similar to me declaring my property independent of the U.S. -- the local, state, and federal government would still believe that their laws governed my property. :-)

MamaOlive said...

Remember I said "some" of the questions. And if I weren't so opinionated myself, I should have said "matter of opinion" instead of "wrong." ;-) I guess I should try to be a little more objective when sharing my viewpoints.

Zane said...

I started taking this test, but I stopped a little over halfway through because I thought it was dumb, and it was taking forever. I had missed two questions. I didn't know Pelosi wasn't the Speaker anymore, and I missed the one about what the constitution did. I guess I don't know what "set up the government" means as an answer. How can a document "set up" anything? Maybe the people who wrote it? Anyway, the question that made me stop was the one that asked which war Eisenhower was in. Eisenhower was enlisted during both World Wars.

MamaOlive said...

Thanks for commenting, Zane.
A lot of people who commented on the site complained about how slow it was to load, and while I did find the answer after each question to be clunky, I don't have trouble with ads thanks to Firefox's Ad Blocker Plus.

Anyway, you make my point better than I did about the test not being intellectual. I had forgotten the one about the constitution "setting up" the government instead of "defining" it or something like that.