I first came across the following 8th grade test posted on the soc.culture.irish newsgroup. So much has changed in only a little over a 100 years, and that is quite evident in the subject matter of the test. Good grammar and knowledge of geography were obviously considered more important than they are today, and the math questions were of a very practical nature. Doing well on this test meant you were well prepared to succeed in the business of the day which at least in the midwest was probably going to have something to do with farming, but it also meant that you would be able to correspond with others using the written word and that you had a basic knowledge of American as well as Earth history.

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I’ve seen this on a couple other blogs now, but I haven’t been able to find it for sale anywhere. This makes me think it was the work of a renegade math geek at some college. You can buy a plain clock and replace the face with any kind of printed art, and I might just do that I like it that much! There are only a couple tricky numbers: 5 made sense after Cathy pointed out it was the factorial of the square root, not the square root of the factorial. 7 gave me pause until I did the proof that .99 repeating actually does = 1 (n=.99rep;10n=9.99rep;10n-n=9;9n=9;n=1), and on 9 I can’t make out the exponents, can you figure them out?