Questions Asked
Most of the questions asked of the savants are designed to be things people should know, but apparently don't (similar to the segment Jaywalking on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno). For example, in one episode, a savant was asked "What color is the exterior of the White House?" After some thought, the savant answered "Beige." Another notable example was an elderly woman who claimed to be a nurse and, when asked what HMO meant, she got it confused with the premium television channel, HBO. Occasionally Nicotero, when asking the savant, would break the fourth wall, such as when a savant who was in the US Navy was asked to define "league" as in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. After getting it incorrect, Nicotero walked up to the camera and said to the contestant "I bet you thought she would get this right!" Sometimes the questions would be vocabulary-based, in which a word, such as pinochle was shown to the contestant, who would then have to speculate whether or not the savant used the word properly in a sentence.
Other questions are trick questions that are designed to catch some people off guard. These are also to see if the savants are paying attention. For example, Nicotero asked one savant, "Canada is the capital of what state?" (Mark DeCarlo was able to successfully put the dunce cap on Mark L. Walberg on that same question and earn $200 for it.) The savant replied, "Australia!" Later, another savant pointed out the right answer by saying, "It's not! It's a country!"
Read more about this topic: Street Smarts
Famous quotes containing the words questions and/or asked:
“Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)