Geographic Awareness - 1 in 5 Cannot find the US on a Map?

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Spatial and geographic awareness are kind of central to both our blog and the research in our Lab at CASA. As such it came as a slight shock to hear the statistic that 1 in 5 American citizens are unable to point out the United States on a map.

To be honest this cannot be true can it? The YouTube movie below shows Miss Teen South Carolina answering the question why she thinks 1/5th of Americans can't find the US on a map:



Before anyone asks - we were not trawling YouTube for Miss America Videos, the link comes courtesy of the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog.

Amazingly the YouTube movie has been viewed 3.5 million times to date - if the movie was geographically tagged and embedded into Google Maps maybe that would help the statistics...