My girlfriend, who’s into homesteading, thought the cow goes with the grass without knowing the context of the question.
China is 45% rural, while the US is 14% rural. Maybe the fact that the US appears to be much more urbanized leads more of its people to lean on abstract groupings? What would the results be if restricted to rural vs. rural or urban vs. urban samples of the population of each country? Even then, I would have to assume the average Chinese college student tends to have more connections with rural lifestyles than the average American college student.
This study reminds me of a similar association-based intelligence test given to rural inhabitants of Soviet Siberia before the Industrial Revolution hit them. They, like the rural Chinese, classified objects together by use instead of taxonomy. The Soviet study is supplemental evidence that the difference comes from urban vs rural distinction rather than one based on philosophical lineage.
Another reason the average Chinese person has more connections with rural lifestyles is how hometown villages work. An enduring theme in Chinese culture is that the city is a place you work but your ancestral village is “home”.
I’m Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret ‘goes with’ as ‘is more like’? I’d have thought it means ‘belongs together’. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but ‘one eats the other’ seems like a more direct relationship.)
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
My girlfriend, who’s into homesteading, thought the cow goes with the grass without knowing the context of the question.
China is 45% rural, while the US is 14% rural. Maybe the fact that the US appears to be much more urbanized leads more of its people to lean on abstract groupings? What would the results be if restricted to rural vs. rural or urban vs. urban samples of the population of each country? Even then, I would have to assume the average Chinese college student tends to have more connections with rural lifestyles than the average American college student.
This study reminds me of a similar association-based intelligence test given to rural inhabitants of Soviet Siberia before the Industrial Revolution hit them. They, like the rural Chinese, classified objects together by use instead of taxonomy. The Soviet study is supplemental evidence that the difference comes from urban vs rural distinction rather than one based on philosophical lineage.
Another reason the average Chinese person has more connections with rural lifestyles is how hometown villages work. An enduring theme in Chinese culture is that the city is a place you work but your ancestral village is “home”.
I’m Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret ‘goes with’ as ‘is more like’? I’d have thought it means ‘belongs together’. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but ‘one eats the other’ seems like a more direct relationship.)
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
Right, I think it’s just hard to interpret the results of this test.
When you put it like that I feel like the homesteading answer is more correct and results from increased knowledge absent from the urban population.