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:
“To the questions of the officiously meddling police Falter replied absently and tersely; but, when he finally grew tired of this pestering, he pointed out that, having accidentally solved “the riddle of the universe,” he had yielded to artful exhortation and shared that solution with his inquisitive interlocutor, whereupon the latter had died of astonishment.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I asked her if she wanted to go to the movies that night. She laughed again and told me that she felt like seeing a Fernandel movie. When we got dressed, she seemed very surprised to see me wearing a black tie and asked me if I was in mourning. I told her that my mother was dead. Since she asked me since when, I answered, “Since yesterday”.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)