> I am tired of this perception around the world that americans do not know geography. A lot of people, all over the world, suck at geography, but the degree o

> I am tired of this perception around the world that americans do not know geography. A lot of people, all over the world, suck at geography, but the degree of suckiness itself does make a difference. I took a similar test back in high school. It was as part of a set of workshops, organised on the occasion of my country of origin joining the EU. I think I saw close to a hundred maps of the world drawn in a similar manner, by young high school students, with a fairly diverse educational background (it was a public school, and there is no income differentiation between them -- schools were financed solely based on the number of pupils). There was plenty of eurocentrism in them, but notably: * NONE OF THEM MISSED FUCKING JAPAN. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MISS JAPAN? Forget about Pearl Harbour and the bombs the US dropped there and all that -- but there's anime and tentacle porn and cyberpunk and Japanese cars. * None of them missed Greenland. How the fuck do you miss Greenland? It's a huge fucking white spot straight near Canada, it's literally impossible to miss it. The only way you can miss Greenland is if you never fucking looked at a world map. * None of them simply warped Asia and Africa. That's probably because of a peculiarity of language -- there is a strong distinction in my native tongue between the Asian continent and the peninsulae in the Middle East. Some students did miss one or two of the unspeakable number of seas in there, but the Arabian peninsula could clearly be seen as such, and it was distinct from the Indian subcontinent. * None of them missed... Madagascar. How the fuck do you miss Madagascar? There's a movie with cute penguins made after it! Notable omissions were the myriad of isles between Indonesia and Australia, the Behring strait was usually larger than it should have been (probably because it gets skewed in different manners under different map projections), the Carribean islands were all joined into a single, large Cuba and Kamchatka was absent in about a third of those maps. But honestly, none of them sucked that badly, those don't even look like Earth.