Is Not Knowing the Capital of Canada a Problem?

MikeG said:
You'll know it more commonly as The Hague, which raises the interesting diversion of the anglicising of place names. For instance, if west Africans weren't such laid-back people, some of them would mention that they consider it rude that we call Cote d'Ivoire (sorry, can't do accents) the Ivory Coast.
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Actually I deliberately spelled it that way, since I was mentioning it in a Dutch context. I know full well we call Den Haag The Hague, much as we call München Munich and Bayern Bavaria.

I don't know why we do it, but I know we do.
 
Hooray, I remembered one of them!

Can't believe I forgot Cape Town and Pretoria though.
 
MikeG said:
Do you know the 2nd largest, though, without google?
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Trick question????

Officially #2 is ...... Johannesburg. It used to be #1, but now Soweto's actually considered, by the RSA, as a separate city and is the largest in South Africa. Joburg runs second. Capetown "metropolitan area" might be up there, but probably isn't close to Durban.
 
AdMan said:
Ask most of the population of the American continent, in their own language, what "America" denotes, and they would disagree with you.

For Latin Americans, America does not mean the United States.
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And, yet, in Mexico, one of the common (non-slang) names for people from the USA is "norteamericanos". "North Americans".

AdMan said:
In my experience, immigrants to the United States have usually adopted the term "America" to mean the United States, because it's obvious how the term is used in this country (and, granted, how it's used in much of the English-speaking world).

My point was that the same term--America--does not equal the United States in the rest of the Americas. The majority of the population of the Americas doesn't refer to the USA as "America."
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They also don't call Germany "Germany", or even "Deutschland", for that matter.



MikeG said:
That's called a leading question.

This is clearly a cultural issue. I presume you are from the US. Over here, whilst there are many people with no idea of the world around them, most would be embarrassed to not know really basic stuff.
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I think some people just have a different idea of what constitutes "really basic stuff"

Do kids in the USA do geography at school?
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Yes. At one point I had to learn all the states and their capitals, then all the world's nations, along with their capitals and the names of their leaders. I've since forgotten a great deal of that information, despite having gotten A's on all the tests.
 
Foolmewunz said:
Trick question????

Officially #2 is ...... Johannesburg. It used to be #1, but now Soweto's actually considered, by the RSA, as a separate city and is the largest in South Africa. Joburg runs second. Capetown "metropolitan area" might be up there, but probably isn't close to Durban.
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Are you sure? I have it the other way around from a number of sources.....but that isn't really the point. The real point is that most people don't seem to have even heard of Soweto, let alone places like Soshanguve or Khayelitsha, and assume that the major cities are all the colonial-era places.
 
Craig B said:
No it wouldn't. Here's the fair question: How many educated Ukrainians know the capital of Belarus? How many educated Peruvians know the capital of Ecuador?
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Still not equivalent. Find a nation that is as geographically large as the US which shares a border with another country which is politically stable, and has only a tenth of the population and a tenth of the GDP, and that only a minority have ever visited.

And that still won't be equivalent. The US dominates the news, even the news in other nations. That's because the US has the largest economy and is involved militarily all over the world. Canada? Not so much.
 
joesixpack said:
Still not equivalent. Find a nation that is as geographically large as the US which shares a border with another country which is politically stable, and has only a tenth of the population and a tenth of the GDP, and that only a minority have ever visited.

And that still won't be equivalent. The US dominates the news, even the news in other nations. That's because the US has the largest economy and is involved militarily all over the world. Canada? Not so much.
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By that reasoning, since the USA is in a category of its own, then its citizens don't need to know anything about anywhere else - and that seems to be what we are finding, judging by some of the posts in this thread.
 
AdMan said:
Yes, most do.

And some actually learn something and remember it.

And many are not proud of the fact that some don't think it's worth having some basic knowledge of the world outside the US.

Defending willful ignorance, as some posters in this thread are apparently doing, is abhorrent.
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I don't think ANYONE here defended willful ignorance. No one here is proud of the fact that they don't know a fact, they're just not ashamed of not knowing. And I frankly don't understand why one should feel shame for not knowing something that is not useful in day to day life for most people.

Save your sanctimony and derision for the people who can't add fractions or do long division, or identify their President or congressional representative.
 
MikeG said:
Are you sure? I have it the other way around from a number of sources.....but that isn't really the point. The real point is that most people don't seem to have even heard of Soweto, let alone places like Soshanguve or Khayelitsha, and assume that the major cities are all the colonial-era places.
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That's obviously only on the central local government area, because the Cape Town metro area is about 9 times that listed there, as can be seen if you click through to its page.
 
joesixpack said:
I don't think ANYONE here defended willful ignorance. No one here is proud of the fact that they don't know a fact, they're just not ashamed of not knowing. And I frankly don't understand why one should feel shame for not knowing something that is not useful in day to day life for most people.

Save your sanctimony and derision for the people who can't add fractions or do long division, or identify their President or congressional representative.
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Why would anybody need to add fractions?
 
I could give a passable impression of someone who knows a bit about philosophy, but most of it was picked up from Monty Python sketches. No Python and I might struggle to remember who said "I think therefore I am" (it was the drunken fart :D)

I think people are being very hard on the USA here - it is much more self-contained than Europe and has less of the international economic and sporting links that European nations have, or at least less that are immediately critical. It's a big deal to a Greek when the EU is discussing their fate so Brussels, Berlin* and all are regularly in the news. Ditto countries that are suffering in a similar way, as their strikes and protests are on the news. Greece qualifies within Europe for the World Cup? Well, that's bunch of countries and probably their capitals that are in the national consciousness.

Why would Americans just pick up these facts when they're not even being exposed to them?

*I very nearly posted with 'Bonn' written there. How embarrassing that would have been.
 
Craig B said:
By that reasoning, since the USA is in a category of its own, then its citizens don't need to know anything about anywhere else - and that seems to be what we are finding, judging by some of the posts in this thread.
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I'm not advocating ignorance, I'm explaining it. Americans aren't profoundly different from other people. We learn a lot in grade school which we later forget because it's not knowledge that gets used much (or at all).

The US pretty much dominates global media because it's the biggest by far. I was amazed when I was in Germany, for example, by the amount of really lame Hollywood films were showing in theaters. How many German films make it to the US in comparison? How many French, Italian, Senegalese, Russian, Brazilian, or Indian films make it to American theaters in general release? How many American pop stars are known all over the world? How many non-American pop stars make it big in the US?

It's not cultural isolationism, it's capitalism. The media giants are international corporations, but the biggest market is America, and the product which they create is geared towards that. Perhaps that will change in the future, but for now there are more Michael Jacksons than Yma Sumacs.
 
joesixpack said:
........The US pretty much dominates global media because it's the biggest by far. I was amazed when I was in Germany, for example, by the amount of really lame Hollywood films were showing in theaters. How many German films make it to the US in comparison? How many French, Italian, Senegalese, Russian, Brazilian, or Indian films make it to American theaters in general release? How many American pop stars are known all over the world? How many non-American pop stars make it big in the US?.......
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What on earth has this got to do with the subject? An American monopoly of films in American cinemas means precisely what when it comes to excusing a lack of knowledge of the rest of the world? Oh, and go tell the good folks of Mumbai or Chennai that their film industry, the biggest in the world, is second rate because American audiences don't get to view the films.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
Why would anybody need to add fractions?
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In the words of Maddox, " ...If you're leading your life in such a way that you never have to do math, congratulations, you are a donkey."

Seriously though, I add fractions quite frequently. And I do algebra a lot as well. I used to use algebra and trig a lot for work, but since I don't work in that field anymore I use it a lot less.

Math is a tool box. You have different tools to solve different types of problems, but I suppose you can get by with just a hammer and a pair of pliers. I've seen (drunk) people drive screws into wood with a hammer. Likewise, like I've seen people convert every fraction to a decimal so that they can add them in a way that is easier for them.
 
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