Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Not Surprising

Really, where do people get these things from:

As many as 11 million British motorists are unable to read a basic road map, according to a survey released Monday.

The poll revealed over three quarters of British drivers were unable to identify the motorway map symbol, while only one percent of motorists would pass the Cub Scout Map Reader badge test.

"It's pretty embarrassing the majority of Cub Scouts have better map-reading skills than the majority of the adult population," said Colin Batabyal, head of underwriting and business development at eSure, which carried out the survey.

There's two things here. The first is that the education syste in the UK is so appalling that there's at last 11 million people who cannot read a book, let alone a map.

It's also true that there's some 30 million women in the UK so we should be surprised that the number who cannot read a map is not much higher.*

* No, that's not just some sexist jibe. There is strong evidence that male and female map reading skills are very different.



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