Report

This morning was a little more interesting. My mum was talking about a newspaper article regarding the "Xiao Hua" and "Xiao Cao" nominees from NUS and NTU. If I'm not wrong, these titles are awarded in recognition of your looks.


What happened was that the nominees were given questions in the field of general knowledge (all in chinese). The first one was : "Who is Singapore's Minister Mentor?" When I first heard the question I didn't know that the chinese term referred to Minister Mentor, so I had to ask my mum for the translation. One guy answered "Goh Chok Tong". Pretty 1337 answer.


Second question: "What is Australia's capital?" Some of them answered Perth and Sydney (I did too =D) while the answer was Canberra.


Third question: "What is the biggest continent?" Some answered Europe, while the answer is Asia.


Fourth: "What is America's capital?" Some didn't know, but one managed to come up with Washington.


Fifth, and my favourite: "What is the answer when you divide 99999 by 11111?" The nominees reportedly took more than a minute to answer this.


The review? The newspaper editor saw it fit to condemn these nominees by labelling them as morons in an important section of the "Lian He Wan Bao". He went on with loads of derisive remarks, finally ending with "No wonder Lee Ao said that Singaporeans are stupid."


Ah, the irony. Why would a competition that's based on looks have their participants bombarded with questions on general knowledge?


Morever, times have changed so rapidly that people these days are not so well-informed of certain details . For example, you would have probably seen the word "Perth" and "Sydney" in the newspapers a dozen times more than "Canberra", given the fact that they are more popular cities. Same goes for "Washington" when people have heard of New York way more often.

I pity the nominees, really. But I'm more sympathetic towards the editor.