This quiz got it right

[pecunium]

You paid attention during 100% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

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Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Although they seem to have confused "North America" with the "United States of America".

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

Do the Caribean Islands count as North America?

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

And I was referring more to the auto-didacticism.

TK

[quercus.livejournal.com]

The obvious "backstory" to the question is that he didn't hit the mainland on the early voyage. However you'd be hard-pressed to make the case that the Bahamas are outside "North America" -- this would rely on some sneakery with boundaries of tectonic plates (if anything) rather than what the question is supposed to discover, which is the issue of mainland vs. island.

I've also always distrusted the Britannia as a source for those figures on world religions (although I'm sure they're what's taught in US schools, especially if it's the sort of school that teaches the Immaculate Conception). If their same definition of "adherent" was applied globally as they've used to get their market share of Europe as being so high for Chritianity, then China would report quite different figures to those that they claim.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think one is hard pressed.

The Canarys, the Azores, and MAdiera aren't seen as part of Africa.

The archipealago which is Malaysia is seen as independant of the mainland.

The fact of isolation which being an island causes puts them into strange categories.

I don't think arguing tectonics, for where Columbus laneded works at all, since there are two questions packed together.

1: What was it when he found it.

2: How is it seen today.

For centuries afterwards, the Islands were/are seen as being different. The Spanish Main, as opposed to New World (which was, to be true, vague, and South America is part of it, but the treatments differed,but when someone wrote of "the New World" at least in English [which relates to the questions of what is, what is taught and how they differ or don't cf. Copernicus and whether the world was flat... for most of mankind, it was; because that was how they knew it. I digress into epistomolgy, applogies).

In there, in a vague way, is all the cultural baggage of 500 years of it's being seen through the lens of history.

In a completely different way, plates aren't relevant to surface understandings. Am I, in California, not part of North America because I'm on the Pacific Plate?

No.

And no more would the islands of the Spanish Main be removed to the mainland by virtue of which plate they sit astride.

TK

[quercus.livejournal.com]

My point isn't "Did he land in North America?", but rather that it's simply a badly worded question, thus a poor test.

The first question is unanswerable -- it depends on your immediate definition of "North America" and that's just too fluid a concept. I happen to think it includes them, perhaps you don't. Neither of us is "wrong" here, we're just picking different criteria according to transient subjective values -- on a flight from Miami to Nassau, I'd certainly take a different view of which was in "North America"

Like too many of these meme questions though, it's worded more as an arrogant trap than as a test of knowledge. The underlying fact we're supposed to be testing here is about timing, not location, and making the geography deliberately or carelessly vague can only confuse, not elucidate.

[ourika.livejournal.com]

I didn't pay attention in high school, and I scored 100%.