I do not usually post here but this email I received is an worth sharing.


What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895

--Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.





8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)




1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of"lie,""play," and "run."
5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.




Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)




1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 p! ! er acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt




U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)




1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.




Orthography (Time, one hour)




1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' ! !

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.


Geography (Time, one hour)




1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the ear! ! th. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete. Gives the saying "he only had an 8th grade education" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?!
No,I don't have the answers, and this college educated person pretty much failed this 8th grade test!

Of course, in 1895, they didn't have Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.htm

Bingley

Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

I like the way this question is phrased. One assumes that I would get full credit for responding "They used to have cowboys there and they still have some cows."

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
Yesterday, Yesteryear-kosytimes, Forgotten
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
Mistake.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
Money and, respectively, money.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
Gimme a globe. NOW.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
We ain’t there jess now Dorothy.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
Beer, Gin and Whiskey. Oh sorry, I thought you said bottles.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
Runners in the first Kentucky Derby.
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
January.

Huh. Don’t see the problem, only took me 2 minutes… :]

From the Snopes site:

Claim: An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards.

Status: False.


Nah, but Snopes are doing their bit by thinking for people in this case think though. Their categories ('True', 'False', 'Undetermined', and what not) are great. Those great purveyors of truth;-)

Claim: Mister Ed, the talking equine of television fame, was a horse.

Status: False.

http://snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp

I don't know if I believe that. Look at the ears and mane.

ooh, irony!

>>Nah, but Snopes are doing their bit by thinking for people in this case think though.

Huh? Please translate.

>>translation?<<

"Tschja, but in this case, I think Snopes is doing its bit by thinking for people, though." That is, I think: they are providing the true or false answer required by all those fill-in-the-oval-you-neanderthal tests any of us with any sense refused to take in the seventh grade. Rather than thinking.

from The Repository of Lost Legends (TRoLL for short).

-ron obvious

TRoLL for short

Check it out here:

http://snopes.com/lost/false.htm

Likewise, members of the clergy, police officers, and anyone else you might instinctively view as inherently trustworthy authority figures have time and again proved they were just as capable as anyone of passing along misinformation as if it were fact.

Well, maybe police officers and anyone else ...

From the snopes article on Mr. Ed:

The difficulty in resolving closely integrated black and white images on non-color television receivers was one of the primary reasons NFL games were not regularly televised until the mid-1960s, when sales of color TV sets started to outstrip those of black-and-white models. When black-and-white television predominated in the nation's living rooms, football games were too often disrupted when players ran into the referees, whose black-and-white striped uniform tops made them nearly invisible to onlookers.

I don't understand this. Assuming that it is true that the refs' uniforms did make them nearly invisible to viewers (and the zebra didn't become invisible, it just looked like a pale-coloured horse), surely the players would still be able to see them.

Bingley

>surely the players would still be able to see them.

the whole thing is an admixture of codswallop and hogwash. do you expect it to hold together consistently as well??

It was a game of hogwash? Where were the choices? Where do we send our votes?

Bingley

I have a recipe for codswallop. It is very salty and has to be soaked overnight in water to draw off the salinity before cooking it in hard liquor, which is what gives it the wallop.

a recipe for codswallop

Does it call for lutefisk?

wallop, v. intr., to move in a rolling, clumsy manner; waddle; to boil noisily, used of a liquid.

'talking as much sense as the the sound of hard boiling cod': "Cod's wallop" coined by North Atlantic fishers.

Just a thought, of course.

Return with me to the prehistoric time when the first human in Norway decided to make lutefisk. One wonders what he/she was thinking. It made sense to pick berries and eat them. It made sense to drink the milk of goats. It made sense to roast a little wooly mammoth over a fire and eat that. But lutefisk?

That prehistoric Norwegian caught a cod, cleaned it, boned it, salted it, and dried it. Then he/she soaked it in lye. Honest to God! He took a can of what would later become the most popular drain cleaner in the world and put his/her food in it for a while. The smell alone was enough to drive invaders back from Norwegian borders.

You just gotta wonder.

They probably accidentlally dropped a piece of cod in the ashes and discovered they could still eat it three weeks later.

And then a lawyer hauled the cod into court and charged it with impersonating food. The cod swore up and down that he was actually edible. The lawyer was forced to conclude:

"As cod is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

They probably accidentlally dropped a piece of cod in the ashes and discovered they could still eat it three weeks later.

This is, of course, the actual history of how black olives were found to be edible, sort of.

And the story of soap, or so I read. But tell!

Olives have been on the table for about 35 centuries. Your standard olive is inedible when first harvested in that it contains a large amount of acrid glucosides which are horrendously bitter. To remove this, olives are soaked for a few days in lye (doubtless produced from wood ashes, which added a bit of the flavour of the particular wood). Then they were soaked in brine and finally approached edibility. How they got those little pimento things in the middle is yet to be discovered.

>>How they got those little pimento things in the middle is yet to be discovered<<

Cortez brought three things with him to Mexico: the sword, the candle, and the martini.

ok it a food thread already--but lots of different cultures have used lye to 'cure food'
olives, lukefish, and hominy are the first three that come to mind..

acid and salt are also used.

the romans used a 'fish sauce' that gave every indication of being rotten --except it wasn't-- which was a good thing, since they put the stuff on damn near everything.. (ancient day equivient of the standard american and ketchup)

cheese is just curdled milk that we all agree is edible.. (and the same goes double for 'blue cheeses'.

In reply to:

---

cheese is just curdled milk that we all agree is edible.. (and the same goes double for 'blue cheeses'.

---

Who's we? I remember reading in one of Amy Tan's books the description by one of the narrators of the first time she saw cheese and had no idea what it was.

Bingley

Once upon a time, a great many years ago, I was serving in Korea and had a task (some heavy lifting) with which some strong young Korean lads assisted. As a thank-you and a treat, I went to the club on the army base and got a couple of pizzas to go. When I returned with Cokes and pizza, the boys were aghast. They loved the Coca Cola, but they asked me, as they sniffed the pizza, how I could eat something that had rotten milk on it.

I, too, hated true/false and multiple choice tests, because all too often the question was not written in such a way that I could really decide on the "answer." I always was finding 'yes, but's and 'only if's and 'all or none of the above's, but in order to make an acceptable grade and continue through the system I would usually make a mark.
One of my children, in second grade, wrote ridiculous answers in her reading comprehension test blanks, because..."Why do they ask us such dumb questions?" I loved it!