I have a small amount of sympathy for people from the USA when it comes to world "trivia". Whilst it is hugely amusing to see people from the USA given maps of Europe and asked to put a pin on major cities like Paris, Madrid and Rome, our own knowledge of the capitals of US states, South American countries and some of those little places in the Caribbean is distinctly hazy.
Schools (here anyway) decided years ago that geography was more about knowing about land masses, rock formations and politics rather than knowing answers to pub quizzes. It gets left to the more trivia-minded students to research those "facts at your fingertips" that we all prize so highly.
The US is a huge country and very few ordinary working people get to travel the world so that they have a specific reason to learn about other countries. I was told that if you live in Florida, an event in California is treated like world news, it is so far away. I think of this as "big country syndrome". There is so much news from war zones, that there are few column inches left to cover the news from the rest of the world. I noticed on this morning's news that two of the top three news items here were about the US (item one was the brouhaha following Clinton's activities during his last days in office). It is hard to imagine a news story from, say New Zealand, making into the top three headlines in the US. The converse is much more likely.
