--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Alex Stanley" <j_alexander_stanley@> > wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <rick@> wrote: > > > > > > > > From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > > > > [mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com] > > > > On Behalf Of authfriend > > > > Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2011 11:20 AM > > > > To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > > > > Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Sarah Palin and Paul Revere > > > > > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > > > > <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> , "Rick Archer" <rick@> wrote: > > > > <snip> > > > > > > Let's all take it and see how we do, without Googling the > > > > > > answers. I got two wrong. > > > > > > > [I wrote:] > > > > > Excellent. I got four wrong, 29 out of 33. Got three about > > > > > financial stuff and the one about the anti-Federalists wrong. > > > > > > <snip> > > > > I blew the one on the Gettysburg Address. I figured Lincoln > > > > was quoting the Declaration of Independence, but he coined > > > > the phrase. The other one I got wrong was Roosevelt appointing > > > > additional members to the Supreme Court. Hadn't known that. > > > > > > It would be interesting to see what questions folks who > > > had high scores got wrong. I'll bet they'd be all over > > > the map, strange little holes in each individual's > > > knowledge that just never got filled in even though they > > > have a broad knowledge base. > > > > I also got only two wrong, Roosevelt/SCOTUS and Lincoln/Douglas. > > I have to admit that if I had to come up with the answers > to the questions on my own, rather than picking from > multiple possible answers, I would probably have done > quite poorly. And I do better than I should on multiple- > guess, I think, because as an editor, I find many of the > wrong answers just *sound* wrong, vaguely worded and/or > too simplistic or otherwise fishy. I'm more likely to get > an answer right because I've been able to rule out the > wrong ones than because I actually knew what the answer > was. > > I spent some time on the Roosevelt/SCOTUS question > because I thought what turned out to be the right answer > was wrong, but trickily so. I finally went with it only > after figuring none of the others could possibly be > right. >
Even with the help of multiple choice, this was not an easy test for the average bear. It helps if you are a good guesser, but you have to know something about American history as well. I nearly missed the one on the Lincoln/Douglas debates, but guessed correctly. I got the Roosevelt/SCOTUS question right because I recently read about it on Wikipedia while researching political trivia questions for a fundraiser that I'm organizing for the Democrats. "The Supreme Court became Roosevelt's primary focus during his second term, after the court overturned many of his programs. In particular in 1935 the Court unanimously ruled that the National Recovery Act (NRA) was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the president. Roosevelt stunned Congress in early 1937 by proposing a law allowing him to appoint up to six new justices, what he referred to as a "persistent infusion of new blood."[104] This "court packing" plan ran into intense political opposition from his own party, led by Vice President Garner, since it upset the separation of powers and gave the President control over the Court. Roosevelt's proposals for the court failed; shortly thereafter the president took another political fall with the nomination of Hugo Black to the court. After Black was confirmed, Black and Roosevelt were widely attacked in the press when it was revealed that Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.[105] Nevertheless, by 1941 Roosevelt had appointed eight justices to the court." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt