Can you pass the US citizenship test?

I asked my spouse to take the test. He did and got 80%. He is much more intelligent than I am. So, what does that tell you about this test.

I missed 3. I also misread the congress question (thought of senators as well). I also missed the Patrick Henry quote and the 7th amendment question.

The supreme court one I got but only because of the word 'selects' the president selects the nominee, congress obviously confirms.

The states one wasn't too hard. One of them had New Zealand and another had Washington DC. It was either Kentucky or New Hampshire and I remember NH being one of the original 13.

But seriously, aside from a few key amendments, who memorizes them all?

I missed one. Had no idea which amendment doesn't deal with voting rights, and guessed wrong.

I guessed right, ya ya, ya ya ya... Waves to Mac11. But I missed another one.





Who cares, really, how many stripes there are? Why is this a question re citizenship?

Reminds me of the Washington Post Date Lab, an adventure into irrelevance....

(No, I'm not berserk, but I read WAPO and ran across Date Lab.)

Hum. I guess that to me, the "number of stripes" question makes more sense than the Patrick Henry quote one....

OE, I won't disagree with you on that...

Though of course I knew about Patrick Henry from those orange colored books in the library back in fourth grade...
and you didn't, gotcha.

I thought some of the questions had merit. We should know some history on how the United States of America was founded.

One of the questions should have been, 'Can you jump a fence?'.

I got 19 out of 20. The one i missed was which INS form is used to apply for citizenship. How the hell do they expect any native citizen, who is not actually employed by the INS, to know the answer to that one?

95%--bah humbug . . .

Same thing here...

Guessed most correctly ... indeed, doing it similar to nimh.

The INS-form and this Patrick were wrong guesses.

The Patrick Henry story is very likely horsiepoop. It did not appear in print until 40 years after the speech was alleged to have been made. It then appeared in a biography, which was more of a hagiography. Most modern scholars consider that the speech was the creation of Mr. Wirt, who wrote the biography. Significantly, there were no contemporary (March, 1775) accounts of the speech. Patrick Henry was given to wild statements, so he may have said something indiscreet on that occasion. However, there is not good reason to assume that he said what Wirt claimed he said.

I mean, I do know the story about John Henry - the one who picked up his hammer ...

I outwitted myself on that one. My thinking was in line with yours, however, it occurred to me: "Uh-oh, trick question," so i guessed wrong by trying to be too clever.

18 out of twenty. Missed the frigging form question and (are we all just used to the Senate rubberstamping Supreme Court nominees??) that one.

Joe(Give me Librium or give me my just desserts)Nation

I think the Supreme Court question gets missed because people are breezing over the questioon itself. The "Who selects.." portion gets glossed over when reading it.

The president selects... the Senate approves or disapproves those selections.

I got 100% right. But I'm good at taking tests. That's all any test does -- shows how good you are at taking tests, not necessarily how much you know. You don't try to figure out what the correct answer is; you try to figure out what answer the testers are looking for.

The Constitution says that the President appoints the Supremes, subject to Senate approval. So whether I think that it's really the Senate which has final say is immaterial. The sought-for answer, obviously, is the POTUS appoints the justices of the SCOTUS.

The only one I hesitated on was the INS application form. But, like fbaezer, I reasoned that the word "application" was a tip-off and I was right.

I agree with Setanta that the Patrick Henry story is probably apocryphal, on a par with George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or throwing a silver dollar across the Delaware River. But so what? He's the only name associated with that phrase.

I got the one on which Amendment has nothing to do with voting rights correct only because I remembered that the Bill of Rights says absolutely nothing about voting and that the 7th Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights. Except for the 15th, I have no idea what those other Amendments are about.(The 13th, 14th and 15th all have to do with the abolition of slavery and subsequent granting of all rights to former slaves and their descendants. Everybody should know that.)

Interesting test. Don't know why new citizens are expected to know all this stuff, when hardly any native-born American does, but it's a good review of basic high school Civics.

Why am I not surprised that I could become a US citizen?


(Missed the supreme court one, while I knew it ).

Just because you don't know who Patrick Henry was doesn't mean he was not important in American history. He first made a name defending a parish from a suit to recover damages by a minister of the established Anglican church. He "lost" the case, but the jury award damages of one penny. That helped to launch his public career. He became important during the Stamp Act crisis. There was another famous speech during the Stamp Act crisis which he probably did not make, but for which he became famous:

Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus; Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third . . . "

(Here he was alleged to have been interrupted by the Speaker Pro Tempore of the House of Burgesses, Peyton Randolph, who is said to have cried: "Treason!")

" . . . George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it."

(It is worth noting that Wikipedia, to which i went to check the text of this alleged speech, gets it wrong--apparently, Wikipedia's "expert" had never heard of Tarquinius Superbus, and didn't know that Brutus was his nemesis, just as another Brutus was the nemesis of Caesar.)

Nice story, but likely untrue. Henry and several other, radical young members waited until near the end of the term, and when many members had returned home, took control of the House because they were the majority of the quorum, and passed a series of proposals in opposition to the Stamp Act, which they had not been able to pass before. Peyton Randolph had drafted the objections to the proposals when they had been defeated earlier in the session. There was an eyewitness to that session, a Frenchman who was visiting, and who published his account the following year, well before the Revolution, and well before Patrick Henry became famous in America--and he mentioned that nothing important happened, and that he found it all boring. Other members in their private papers wrote that Henry got his mouth running, demanding the passage of the proposals (they were passed, but repudiated by Randolph--but they were published, in an hilarious variety of forms, in newspapers in the colonies, and became an important focus in the Stamp Act resistance, and helped to convene the Stamp Act Congress in October, 1765). Those same accounts, however, say that Randolph accused Henry of treasonous speech, and that Henry apologized and sat down.

Patrick Henry was the first Governor of Virginia after the successful conclusion of the Revolution, and as Virginia was then the most populous state, that was important. He later served another term. He also opposed ratification of the Constitution, and then entered his political twilight. I'm not surprised that foreigners don't know who he was, but it's rather sad that Americans don't.