An innocent enough question, I thought, when I was asked it at work today.

That was before the next question made me very suspicious of being the unwitting victim in some wind-up..." Do you know where the North and South Poles are?" But no, the question was a serious one...the fella got out a desk diary with a map of the world in it and asked me to explain where they were. The map, though, had the top and bottom cropped off like this so that the Arctic zones weren't shown...



It took a bit of explaining where they were and why they weren't on the map, and he was eventually satisfied because what I'd told him independently tied up with what another workmate had just told him shortly beforehand. "What I don't understand, though" he said," is that I always thought that it got hotter and hotter the further south you went...!"

He really wasn't aware that the equator is the hottest area and that it then got cooler the further south you went; he actually thought that where we were telling him that the South Pole was, was in his mind the hottest part of the planet!

How do you react to someone who hasn't a clue about something which you take for granted that everyone knows, but apparently not? It wasn't easy trying to keep a straight face and answer his question in all seriousness, but I wouldn't have been ignorant and laugh because he was being serious. But it makes me wonder, what percentage of our population actually don't know basic facts like this?

How good do you think your knowledge is about the world around us?