Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Quiz on Current Events from Pew Research

Test your News IQ at Pew Research with 12 questions on current events. I featured a previous edition of the quiz back in February - a few questions are the same.

HT: Ryan Stinson

14 Comments:

At 4/27/2010 10:53 AM, Anonymous Ryan said...

What did you get?

 
At 4/27/2010 10:57 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I got 11 out of 12. Got the oil question wrong.

 
At 4/27/2010 11:27 AM, Blogger Jason K said...

10, missed the oil and the training of the bomber.

 
At 4/27/2010 12:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

11 of 12. Missed the oil question

 
At 4/27/2010 2:43 PM, Blogger KO said...

12 out of 12. I'm glad the current events didn't include some reality tv star I've never heard of.

The oil question was actually the 2nd most correctly answered question. With 57% getting it right, behind 59% for the US Debt question.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1478/political-iq-quiz-knowledge-filibuster-debt-colbert-steele

13% of people didn't get at least 2 questions right.

 
At 4/27/2010 4:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I missed the bond question. i thought Saudis still had more invested in US. Dumb. I knew better but decided it was a trick question.

 
At 4/27/2010 4:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Geez. They did worse than random chance?

that's the kind of thing that worries me / makes me laugh when I hear somone saying things will get better when we have an educated populace. (usually meaniing populace tht agrees with the speaker.)

Had to be some clowns pulling some leg over at Pew.

 
At 4/27/2010 8:26 PM, Anonymous Douglas2 said...

Once again I got the oil question "wrong". Once again I went to the data at http://www.eia.doe.gov and discovered that I got the oil question right, and Pew got it wrong.

 
At 4/27/2010 9:24 PM, Blogger juandos said...

Who the heck is Stephen Colbert?

Missed that one...

 
At 4/27/2010 10:04 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

all right but Afgan/Iraq question.

Gross oil imports are ~60% of total consumption according to

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/us-united-states/ene-energy&b_cite=1

so 2/3 is the closest answer, unless you interpret the question to be net imports.

 
At 4/27/2010 10:25 PM, Blogger KO said...

Douglas2, what data are you looking at?

From this EIA table it sure looks like 2/3.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_crdsnd_k_a.htm

For 2006 to 2008, about 1.8 billion barrels domestic production. 3.6 or 3.7 billion barrels imported.


Juandos, Stephen Colbert does the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. I think it was a spin off from John Stewarts' "The Daily Show."

 
At 4/28/2010 9:12 AM, Blogger juandos said...

"I think it was a spin off from John Stewarts' "The Daily Show""...

John Stewart?

Hmmm, I have the Comedy Channel on my cable service, maybe I should take a look at it...

Thanks...

 
At 5/01/2010 8:33 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

9/12 and I'm on the other side of the world. That said most Australians would have difficult naming our treasurer / governor general and in fact we had to have a TV campaign to remind people who our first Prime minister was.

 
At 5/03/2010 9:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't be too proud of yourself if you got 12/12.

One of their answers is wrong: at least from the standpoint of anybody in the oil industry, the oil import question and its answer are bogus.

The US Energy Information Agency is the authority on the data. According to their website http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/country_energy_data.cfm?fips=US (updated January 6, 2010), 2008 US production totaled 8514.3 kbd versus consumption of 19498.0 kbd. Net imports totaled 10983.7 kbd. According to my trusty calculator, net oil imports comprised 56% of total consumption in 2008. The last time I checked, 56% is closer to 50% than it is to 67%.

The most recent year that EIA has published annual results is 2008. There is monthly data for 2009. Scanning the monthly data, it pretty clear that imports (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTIMUS1&f=M ) fell from 2008 to 2009 while exports actually increased a bit (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTEXUS1&f=M ). I didn’t run the numbers, but it’s pretty obvious that the import percentage didn’t increase by ten percentage points.

So, how is that the Pew Charitable Trust, funded by the heirs of an oil tycoon and dedicated to “press and policy issues”, can’t manage to get the answer to a fundamental question about US oil imports correct? Don’t tell me that they used gross imports as a metric rather than net imports: that would convey an lamentable lack of industry understanding.

 

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