from today's Melbourne Age:

http://people.morehead-st.edu/fs/w.willis/eighthgrade.html

Test yourselves in Orthography and Grammar particularly.

taking the liberty to make this clickable:

http://people.morehead-st.edu/fs/w.willis/eighthgrade.html

thanks, paulb! I was looking for that a while back. I think what's happening here is we (and especially schoolkids today) have so much more information to deal with than kids did a hundred years ago. Plus, many of the "givens" have changed. But I, as an old liberal arts type, lament the shift from "genteel" knowledge to tech knowledge. Would you like fries with that?

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but this one's a fake. It's been in the Telegram here, too. It's a pity that the people who edit the newspapers don't bother to check their sources!

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

Yikes!©

Whew!

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but this one's a fake.

I was thinking that when I did the test and then I saw your post (I tend to read the Daily Archives before visiting the board so I don't get everything in order). A few of the questions are unanswerable and require a lot more information otherwise they become open to interpretation.

That question about calculating the interest. Compound? Simple? Weekly? Daily? Monthly? APR? It diesn't specify and they all yield different answers.

It was fun to read, though.

Thanks for that link, Bean.

An email has been despatched to the Education editor of The Age.

Sorry folks -- guess we shouldn't always believe everything we read!

guess we shouldn't always believe everything we read!
Here's something else for you not to believe, my dear paulb: I don't love you!