From “Some Answers We Did Not Expect,” a chart that accompanied “The Cultural Literacy of Graduate Management Students,” an article in the September/October 1992 issue of Business Horizons, published at the Indiana University School of Business, in Bloomington. The study was conducted by Richard P. Vance, Brooke A. Saladin, Robert W. Prichard, and Peter R. Peacock, who asked ninety-six first- year graduate students at Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management to define 250 terms taken from E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. The study found that students were able to correctly define only 17.2 percent of the terms. The authors teach at Wake Forest. Below is a selection of incorrect answers.

Acrophobia: fear of acronyms
Actuary: a home for birds
Annunciation: to speak clearly
Aaron Burr: Perry Mason
Cellulose: fat deposits
Duodenum: a number system in base two
Gerrymander: to speak at length in Congress to keep a bill from passing
Jehovah: Jesus
Ramadan: Jewish holiday
Salome: “hello” in Hebrew
1066: an IRS form
Stradivarius: as in “Rex”
Xylem: as in “insane”