I found an old clipping last week from the Wall Street Journal letters page, sometime in the early 1980s. The writer had saved his high school entrance exam from 1911, taken in rural Indiana, and sent along a sampling.
- In what state and on what waters are the following: Chicago, Duluth, Cleveland, and Buffalo? State an important fact about each.
- Name and locate two countries in the following are important products: wheat, cotton, wool, coffee.
- Write on the Panama Canal, telling who is building it, its location and importance.
- What causes the change from day to night and from winter to summer?
- Name five republics, three limited monarchies, and one absolute monarchy.
- Name the classes of sentences on the basis of meaning or use. On the basis of form.
- Write a sentence with its verb in the active voice; change to passive voice.
- What is meant by inflection? What parts of speech are inflected?
- Write sentences containing nouns showing six case relations.
- Write a model business letter of not more than 40 words.
- What is the length of a rectangular field 80 rods wide that contains 100 acres?
- A wagon is 10 feet long, three feet wide, and 28 inches deep: how many bushels of what will it hold?
- A rope 500 feet long is stretched from the top of a tower and reached the ground 300 feet from the base of the tower: how high is the tower?
- In physiology, name three kinds of joints and give an example of each.
- Give the structure of a muscle and of the spinal cord.
- Define arteries, veins, capillaries, and pulse.
- Write a brief biography of Evangeline.
- What do you think the author of “Enoch Arden” aims to teach us?
- What kind of a man was Shylock?
I couldn’t answer a lot of these now, and I am thrice the age of a potential high school entrant.
What’s interesting about these questions is the amount of local knowledge, civics, economics they cover. Knowing what cities lie on what bodies of water and what crops are grown where requires you to understand the wider world in ways many of us don’t today.
Of course, they also cover a lot of archaic stuff: who know what a rod is or how many bushels will fit in a 35 cubic foot wagon? Just for your edification, a bushel is 2150.42 cubic inches.
And a rod? Go work that one out for yourself.
Suggest some updated versions of these questions in comments, if you like.
* In what state and on what waters are the following: Chicago, Duluth, Cleveland, and Buffalo? State an important fact about each.
Chicago, Illinois on Lake Michigan; Duluth, Georgia on the Chattahoochee (okay, okay, Minnesota on Lake Superior would be the conventional answer); Cleveland, Georgia on Lake Burton (or Ohio on Lake Erie); and Buffalo, New York (also on Lake Erie, although not too far from Lake Ontario. Think that one might be intended to trip you up). An important fact about each? Uhhh . . . Chicago has the world’s busiest airport (probably wasn’t acceptable in 1911); Duluth was once home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the world; Cleveland was where the first African-American newspaper was published; and Buffalo is, of course, the town that gave us Buffalo-style chicken wings. Mmmm.
* Name and locate two countries in which the following are important products: wheat, cotton, wool, coffee.
Uhhh… OK, I’m out. :) (coffee: Colombia and Brazil I can locate on a map. wool, I’d say New Zealand and Scotland - again, I can find those. Cotton? Pretty big in the USA, I hear, but no idea where else, maybe India? And wheat is important pretty much everywhere, innit? …)
* Write on the Panama Canal, telling who is building it, its location and importance.
No essays in this space,sorry. :)
* What causes the change from day to night and from winter to summer?
The earth’s rotation on its axis and its revolution around the Sun combined with its axial tilt, respectively.
* Name five republics, three limited monarchies, and one absolute monarchy.
Whaaat? There are countries out there that aren’t republics yet?! Alert George Bush!!
* Name the classes of sentences on the basis of meaning or use.
interrogative, imperative, declarative, exclamation
On the basis of form.
not sure what they’re looking for here.
* Write a sentence with its verb in the active voice; change to passive voice.
I wrote this sentence in the active voice. This sentence was written in the passive voice.
* What is meant by inflection?
Changing the form (typically the ending) of a word to denote grammatical function or variation.
What parts of speech are inflected?
Nouns (to denote plural and possession), verbs (to denote person, tense, aspect, and mood), pronouns (to denote case), adjectives (to denote comparative/superlative).
* Write sentences containing nouns showing six case relations.
Bah. English nouns do not have six cases. Stupid trying-to-be-Latin mentality!
* Write a model business letter of not more than 40 words.
Essays, space, no.
* What is the length of a rectangular field 80 rods wide that contains 100 acres?
Well, that’s easy. The acre is defined in terms of rods, which is why it’s such an odd number in terms of feet or anything else. An acre is defined as the area of a 4×40 rod rectangle. So an 80-rod-wide field would have an area of one acre if it were 2 rods long, which means that the length of the above 100-acre version must be 200 rods. That’s 1100 yards, 3300 feet, or something very close to one kilometer.
* A wagon is 10 feet long, three feet wide, and 28 inches deep: how many bushels of what will it hold?
120×36x28=120960 cubic inches. Now, I happen to know that a *liquid* gallon is 231 cubic inches, so that’s about 523 2/3 of those, but bushels are dry measure. I don’t know how many cubic inches in a bushel or dry gallon, but I recall that dry measures are approximately 1/6 bigger than their liquid counterparts. So 523 2/3 * 6/7 = about 448 dry gallons, which, at 8 gallons to the bushel is 56 bushels.
* A rope 500 feet long is stretched from the top of a tower and reached the ground 300 feet from the base of the tower: how high is the tower?
Ah, good old trigonometry. Don’t even have to do any calculations; this is the old 3-4-5 right triangle, so the tower is 400 feet high.
* In physiology, name three kinds of joints and give an example of each.
uhhhhhhhh . . . . socket joint (shoulder), connective joint (knee), and who knows. totally lost here.
* Give the structure of a muscle and of the spinal cord.
What you mean “structure”?
* Define arteries, veins, capillaries, and pulse.
Arteries: large blood vessels through which oxygen-rich blood flows from the the heart and lungs to the rest of the body
Veins: smaller blood vessels through which oxygen-depleted blood flows from the body back to the heart
Pulse: the action of the beating heart, especially its rate.
* Write a brief biography of Evangeline.
* What do you think the author of “Enoch Arden” aims to teach us?
* What kind of a man was Shylock?
Who are these people??
degree! that’s what it’s called. Adjectives are inflected to show degree, of which comparative and superlative are two examples.
Hmm, so why not suggest some more, uh, modern questions along those lines?
Swap in the Space Station for the Panama Canal, for example (or is there another grand public works project near and dear to your heart?)
and I knew you would ace those pedantic grammar questions ;-)
Reading this over (I needed these questions for someone else), a college graduate doesn’t know “What kind of a man was Shylock?”
I remember that letter! I clipped it, too!!
But then I lost it. :-(
But then I found it again, in a book by Milton Friedman (or perhaps by Milton & Rose). It seems that you and I and the Greatest Economist in the World all clipped the same letter from the WSJ. (Sorry, I no longer remember which of Friedman’s books it was, though.)
-Dave Burton
Cary, NC
In physiology, name three kinds of joints and give an example of each.Chicago, Illinois on Lake Michigan; Duluth, Georgia on the Chattahoochee (okay, okay, Minnesota on Lake Superior would be the conventional answer); Cleveland, Georgia on Lake Burton (or Ohio on Lake Erie); and Buffalo, New York (also on Lake Erie, although not too far from Lake Ontario. Think that one might be intended to trip you up). An important fact about each? Uhhh . . . Chicago has the world’s busiest airport (probably wasn’t acceptable in 1911); Duluth was once home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the world; Cleveland was where the first African-American newspaper was published; and Buffalo is, of course, the town that gave us Buffalo-style chicken wings. Mmmm.
* Name and locate two countries in which the following are important products: wheat, cotton, wool, coffee.