The question I remember was: Which is the best pair?
- Peaches and ice cream
- Peaches and cream
- Peaches and apricots
The correct answer is peaches and apricots as they are both fruit. The question is obviously designed to mislead.
Spanish tests love to do the same. A sample driving test theory question for instance shows a tram and a car arriving at an unmarked junction and asks who should give way. The answer is the tram. There is a general rule to give way to traffic from the right at unmarked junctions. Obviously the likelihood of such a junction existing is minimal. The question tests something theoretical and unreal with no real practical application. Spanish education is a bit like that too. One commentator remarked that the Spanish way, for a course for trainee carpenters, would be to have questions on the properties of different woods and the history of cabinet making alongside a multiple choice question to identify different joints but without any sort of practical test.
To join the Spanish national police force here you have to do a competitive exam. One part of the latest exam has a test about words. There is a list of words and the question is are they spelled correctly as in the official Spanish dictionary. This adds a bit of a twist. One of the words for instance is outlet. It's used all over Spain for factory shops. It's spelled correctly in the list but it is not in the official dictionary so if you said it was correct you'd be wrong! Candidates should, apparently, know whether a common, everyday word is in the dictionary or not. If outlet is wrong then Brent, to describe a type of crude oil, is in the list, is spelled correctly and is in the dictionary. Broker is a bit half and half - it's in the list and in the dictionary but it needs an accent to be spelled correctly in Spanish - bróker. The other words in the test are often difficult and/or uncommon words - antediluvian and ribonucleic for instance are obviously words that any police officer is going to be using a lot.
Over the weekend we had the Spanish film awards; they're called The Goyas. The principal host of the nearly all "virtual" event was Antonio Banderas. He'd obviously called a lot of his Hollywood chums who kept popping up throughout the ceremony to say "I support Spanish cinema" Some, like Tom Cruise and Robert de Niro did it in Spanish. Emma Thompson did it in Spanish too. She said it twice once in her best Spanish accent and then in a parody of a British person speaking Spanish. The comment I read in one of the newspapers said that the stars were "trying" to speak Spanish. I laughed because when the Spanish newspapers report on someone Spanish speaking in English, like Rafa Nadal, Felipe VI or President Pedro Sanchez they nearly always say "in perfect English". They do, all three of them speak good English just as do Bruno Tonioli and Jean Paul Gaultier.
