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:
“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions, at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail—not the tail that wags the dog.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)