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
CARPE DIEM
Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
HT: Ryan Stinson
About Me
- Name: Mark J. Perry
- Location: Washington, D.C., United States
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Previous Posts
- Richmond Fed Index Reaches All-Time High in April
- Great WSJ Website for Economic Graphs and Data
- From the Mall to the Docks, Signs of Rebound; Port...
- NABE: Business Recovery Gaining Momentum
- Thatcher's Last Stand Against Socialism
- Forget the Jobless Recovery, We Might Be Headed fo...
- How Kennedy Tax Cuts Changed Pro Boxing
- Mean/Median Confusion
- "Great Housing Market Bust is Over"
- "The Model Has Changed" aka Creative Destruction: ...
14 Comments:
What did you get?
I got 11 out of 12. Got the oil question wrong.
10, missed the oil and the training of the bomber.
11 of 12. Missed the oil question
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who the heck is Stephen Colbert?
Missed that one...
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.
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."
"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...
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.
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.
Post a Comment
<< Home