PETALING JAYA, March 28 — With the excellent results in public examinations making headlines every year, identifying the states in the country should be a piece of cake for secondary school students. Sadly, that is not the case.
More than half the 60 teenagers and young adults who took Malay Mail’s survey on general knowledge in Penang, Perak and Selangor did not even know there are 13 states and three federal territories in the country. Instead, most of them said there are 14 states.
Only four could accurately name all the states on a blank map, although 45 could identify more than half.
The Federal Territory of Labuan seemed to have most confused as it was labelled as Sarawak and even Pulau Perhentian.
It appeared to be even harder for the respondents to pair the states to the flags in our survey as only nine managed to name all accurately.
To the question on where the nation’s administrative capital was, only 21 answered Putrajaya and some said Kuala Lumpur.
Only 11 managed to say the nation’s population was about 30 million, while 23 knew the most populous state was Selangor.
The wrong answers for the question on Malaysia’s population ranged from 10 million to a ludicrous 17 billion.
The respondents barely fared better when asked to correctly identify the location of five countries — South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Egypt, and the US — and the UK, though only three managed to do so for all six.
Again, there were some wild guesses as some students guessed that Australia was in North America, UK next to Brazil, and the US, a neighbour of Russia.
Largely, the countries that were most easily identified were South Korea and Australia. At the other end of the spectrum was the UK which befuddled many students.
Although the number of the survey’s respondents is a smidgen of the number of teenagers and students in the country, the findings are not far from the truth.
The level of general knowledge of young Malaysians is something to worry about but Education Minister II Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh might differ.
Recently, he was confident that Malaysian students would do better in this year’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) after they came in bottom third previously.
Such is his confidence that he said recently he was willing to put himself in the line of fire as he believed there was no way to go now but up. Let’s hope he is right.
