Welcome to Gaia! ::

Well, I was in a hotel room yesterday and of course when they say 'free cable TV offered to all patrons', they subscribe to a whopping 4 channels. One of which was Fox, I think, so being the bored little tourist I was I decided just to watch the tube until I got sleepy enough to... um... sleep.

The program that happened to be running was 'Are you smarter than a fifth grader', a show that takes the far right small bell curve of children and pits it against the middle-mass of your average American idiot. The man who chanced to be on the spot was a professional poker player. Shows how much he tried in school... never mind.

But they had the category 'third grade English' on as I turned to the channel. The question was 'what is the simple past tense of the verb 'drink'?'

And he had two responses: the sober answer and the tipsy answer. It was 'drank' (which was correct) or 'drunk'. I drank a beer. I drunk myself stupid. He said it was a 50 50 chance and he was just going to have to guess. I mean, he IS a poker player. He gambles for a living, right? Then again, he had already used up both his 'cheats' and his 'lifeline', so I can't say how well he fared on the easier questions.

Excuse me while I despair. In KINDERGARTEN you are told 'when in doubt, work it out'. Listen to how these sound. I drank a glass of lemonade. I drunk a glass of lemonade. Now, I'm no linguist, but that last one sounds funny. I'm not even a pro with all the technical babble, 'simple past tense' baffles me. But I know which one is correct.

Drank, of course.

It's because people lack the sense, patience, training, what-have-you, to stop and think before they go on that grammar suffers. The man guessed right, but you shouldn't have to guess. You should KNOW. Even a toddler could GUESS the winning lottery numbers. But I bow to the man who actually KNOWS them.

I suspect that after the show, the man drank himself drunk. Serves him right for guessing on a question he would have known if he had stopped to think about it.

Ahh, that seems like a very intresting show. I do not understand how you can not work that out. Like you said, "I drunk lemonaid." sound odd. I'm not the best at past tenses but that sounds like something my seven year old neighbor would say.
The only one that baffles me though is "stare". "store" is the word that comes to mind not "stared".

I watch this show quite often. It seems that most of the questions asked, are harder than they seem. For example, lets say they ask an algebra question, but it's in the 4th grade section. Not many schools teach algebra in the 4th grade. At least none that I know of.

Still how hard is x-3=0, find x. I mean come on. If you've passed High School you should be able to do at least that much.

Yeah... I happen to be in High School myself and I can whiz english and history and computer programming and biology with my brain tied behind my back, but I have to take collegiate algebra instead of advanced and I have to *fight* to keep my french grade out of the dumpster.

I am the kind of student that needs parallels, because I'm good at english and if you relate the french tenses to english somehow, however vague, I can whiz them. But I have a teacher that goes RAWRG DON'T THINK JUST BE FRENCH so I get tossed into the dust.

Blarr, french grammar... I get you but then you come back to bite me in the butt... gonk

I saw that one! That guy took forever to come up with the answer which was so obvious.

French grammar is a b***h, I tell you! scream Even native speakers use the wrong tenses all the time which is why my dad corrects me so much... -_-

As to this show... That's sounds so silly! xd I would love to watch it sometime and laugh.

Most of the questions asked on that show are abou things that you don't actually use day-to-day, and forget once you leave school. For example, "What is the most common first name for US presidents?"