Jimmy Kimmel asked Americans to name any country on a map, and the results were terrifying - Independent

Jimmy Kimmel asked Americans to name any country on a map, and the results were terrifying
Posted July 17, 2018 by Jake Hall in news 
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American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is no stranger to a viral video.

Week after week, his team scour the streets of America to ask strangers deceptively easy questions – usually with hilarious repercussions.

His most recent test was devised in response to Trump’s European visit: “It’s important that America has strong relationships with, and knowledge about people in other lands, and that responsibility extends to all of us, not just the president,” he emphasised.

In order to measure this knowledge, his team went out with a map and a simple request: name any country.

Jimmy Kimmel
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@jimmykimmel
 We asked pedestrians to name ANY country on a map. It didn't go well...

12:41 AM - Jul 14, 2018

Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents failed spectacularly. Plenty failed to realise that Africa was in fact a continent, not a country; when prompted to specify, one man correctly named South Africa, but inexplicably thought it was located in North West Africa. Seriously – the clue’s in the name.

One woman laughed, exclaiming:

My geography is so horrible, I can’t name anything!

She then pointed to South America and asked if it was South Africa. When her mistake was clarified, she failed to name a single country; the interviewer, bewildered, asked, “Did you go to school, college?”

Smiling, she clarified that she had before exclaiming soberly:

Yes, that’s the sad part!

Another man confidently pointed to Alaska, incorrectly stating it was “Greenland, or Iceland or something.” Others failed to even attempt to name any; one woman, when asked to pinpoint an African country, seemed shocked: “Who knows stuff like that?”

Luckily, a young boy in a baseball cap emerged at the tail-end of the video to list an impressive number of countries. Scrolling seamlessly through countries in South America, he then went on to identify others including Papua New Guinea, Greenland and New Zealand.

Maybe Michael Jackson was right – maybe children really are the future.