Sense or Nonsense: Testing the Value of Claims.

"Habit is Stronger Than Truth."

--George Santayana

We would like to believe that we respond to the "real" in what we perceive. But in fact reality treads only lightly on the grounds of our interpretation. Instead, we rely (as Santayana suggests) on habit, appearance, desire, and predisposition to decide what does and does not make sense. This exercise is designed to elicit consideration of what factors help you to determine the sensibility of a claim. Below you will find a series of statements. Some or all may be true; some or all may be false. You must assign a value of true or false to each. Whether you are right or wrong is largely irrelevant. What is valuable is the recreation of your pattern of interpretation; so keep an ear open to that inner voice, while you take the test. When you are done, go to the discussion and see how much of that explantion resonates with your experience.

After you have taken the test:
you will hit the "submit" button. That will take you to a page on the SUNY Cortland server that confirms the completion of your form. You must then go back to the form page and hit the link below the submit button to access the discussion.

The Sense or Nonsense Quiz.

Enter your name:

True or False?

  1. truefalse The "Yellow Pages" are yellow, because the originator of the concept, Herbert Williams, of Patterson, New Jersey, had a five-year-old daughter who really liked the color yellow.
  2. truefalse The "soldier ant " eats up to fifteen times its own weight every day.
  3. truefalse Aristotle had a nickname among the other members of the "academe " that, today, would roughly translate into "stinky feet. "
  4. truefalse There is a company in Los Angeles whose employees scour the trash cans of movie sets for celebrity garbage, then sell it to the public.
  5. truefalse The original working title of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet " was "Too Young to Wed. "
  6. truefalse The inventor of the transistor, an Engineer at the University of Illinois, conceived the entire working blueprint in a dream.
  7. truefalse Among the references in the "Dead Sea Scrolls " is one to a game not unlike what we call "Field Hockey. "
  8. truefalse Although the law was almost never enforced, between 1891 and 1973, there was a statute on the books of the city of New York making it illegal to ridicule stock brokers.
  9. truefalse The South American pocket snake sheds its skin at sundown every day.
  10. truefalse There is a verse in the Catholic Bible that begins "Your Two Breasts. . . "
  11. truefalse The role of Indiana Jones was originally offered to William Shatner, who turned it down, because co-star Karen Allen was taller than he was.
  12. truefalse The "Northern Hebrides " are actually south of the "Southern Hebrides. "
  13. truefalse For thirteen years, between 1911 and 1924, astronomers accepted the existence of a planet beyond Pluto that its discoverer, Enrico Manola, of Portugal, named Mylo, after his dog. But it turned out to be a comet, so they do not count it anymore.
  14. truefalse The French have a version of "Friday the Thirteenth " roughly translated as "Really Bad Tuesday. "
  15. truefalse There is no record of the word "career " prior to 1925.
  16. truefalse The amount of money paid out by New York City in fraudulent welfare payments in one year would fund the entire city school system for that same year.
  17. truefalse The miniature orb spider spins web fibers that are stronger than Kevlar, the material used to make bullet-proof vests.
  18. truefalse In the Seventh century, there was a Pope named Lyle.
  19. truefalse No candidate since 1817 (the year Peoria, Illinois was founded) has ever won the Presidency of the United States without carrying Peoria.
  20. truefalse Paris, Texas and Paris, France are on exactly the same line of latitude--which is why the denizens of Paris, Texas chose the name.

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