✧✦Catherine✦✧why do i need to know this for settlement
who gives a fuck
Ryan Finnie@whitequark Is this, like, something every Brit knows as a piece of useless trivia? Like how San Francisco is 49 square miles and they made that into the geo-cultural identity of the city?
Space Hobo
Colin Watson@spacehobo @ryan @whitequark Most people born here probably know it's the longest distance on the mainland. I doubt many people know the numerical value, unless they've cycled/run/whatever it.
@cjwatson @ryan @whitequark Yes, and I'll admit I only know the distance in metric (from when I was obsessively plotting routes during lockdown) and had to convert to go "Oh it's at *least* that much..."
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@ryan @whitequark absolutely not. I have lived here all my life, I'm 38, and I could not have answered any of these. the tests are such bullshit designed to reject as many people as possible through bizarre trivia.
@gsuberland @ryan don't forget about charging exorbitant per-attempt fees
@whitequark @ryan yeah the home office are absolute scumbags
@whitequark @gsuberland @ryan Wait until you get to the point where they deduct an £N,000 fee and also check your accounts to make sure you have £N,000 laying about — IN THAT ORDER.
@spacehobo @gsuberland @ryan HAHAHAHA wow
I've definitely... encountered... the tendency of the UK government to charge you exorbitant fees to do fuckin anything it's supposed to be doing, but I have thankfully avoided that specific issue
Ben Tasker@gsuberland @ryan @whitequark Same here - I didn't know a single one.
It's not even as though they're particularly interesting as a bit of trivia
@ben @ryan @whitequark I reckon they should just have a single question: "have you ever stepped on a plug?"
then they leave a freeform box, and if you reply with words to the effect of "yes and it fucking hurt, but british plugs are still the best" then you get citizenship
@gsuberland @ben @ryan if I wrote down how I feel about BS1363 plugs (though to me they're the HK plugs, not the UK plugs, because that's where I first had the misfortune of encountering them) they'd cancel my visa
@whitequark @gsuberland @ryan You might be able to avoid that cancellation by then going on to complain about the current state of the weather
anyMouse@whitequark @gsuberland @ben @ryan Multiparagraph rant over how British plugs are just the point of a really popular circlejerk and actually suck from both design and user perspective was the only comment I ever got gold for on Reddit (back when that was a thing).
PassengerThe naturalisation exam is deliberately filled with rote memorisation of absurd trivia as a way to catch people out and make it hard for them to pass. If you show it to Brits born there, almost none of them can do it.
@passenger @ryan I'm not even doing naturalization! I just want settlement
I want you to have settlement too. The Home Office wants to ensure that only people who can pass a weird fairytale riddle game can get it, for some reason.
Advanced Persistent Teapot@whitequark this is such bullshit, at least they should ask questions which are vaguely useful. Like, you go in to a shop wanting a large white bread bun, which of the following words should you use in which town:
London
Northampton
Manchester
Newcastle
---
Stottie
Barm Cake
Cob
Bap
Answer: it doesn't fucking matter because people won't kill you for not using the local term of art
joshie 🏳️🌈@whitequark these feel like slightly obscure pub quiz questions
maybe that's the real settlement process: going to a traditional british pub quiz
@6a62 its only funny if your future doesn't entirely hinge on it
@whitequark fair, my apologies. I know it's going to be painful if my bf ever decides to go for settlement
@whitequark
When I took this 15 years ago, it was mostly demographics questions like what percentage of the UK population were different world religions etc, plus details of rights and benefits of citizenship.
@6a62
When I took this 15 years ago, it was mostly demographics questions like what percentage of the UK population were different world religions etc, plus details of rights and benefits of citizenship.
@6a62
@spacehobo @6a62 oh, they really ramped up the jingoism then
@whitequark @6a62 Yeah, that was one thing David Cameron was really proud of.
Incidentally, as I came from the US and Mrs. Hobo's co-worker came from India, we didn't have to take an English exam but he did. Never mind that The US at that time HAD NO NATIONAL LANGUAGE and India's national language is ENGLISH due to having been A BRITISH COLONY IN LIVING MEMORY. He described the interviews like this:
THEM: "Where did you learn English?"
HIM: "Uh, just growing up?"
"No, but in India, where did you take English courses?"
"I didn't? We spoke English?"
"We don't see you using English enough in your profession so you'll need to take a series of exams."
"Do you mean my profession as English copywriter?"
So yeah, you don't have to look far to find rampant racism in the system. The process to collect a first-time UK passport involves these weird grilling questions about your identity that ask you to do things like tell the colour of bricks on your building. I was lucky I caught the trap there, as they'd just pressure-washed the brown off ours to reveal the yellow bricks below and I could tell that the interviewer had gone off an older google street view image (back when that was brand new).
@spacehobo @6a62 holy fucking shit
"We don't see you using English enough in your profession so you'll need to take a series of exams."
"Do you mean my profession as English copywriter?"
@spacehobo @6a62 what absolute ghouls
Asta [AMP]@whitequark @spacehobo @6a62 reading these questions genuinely pissed me off. They're exactly like the literacy tests some states in the US used to give, and for exactly the same bullshit racist reasons.
@aud @spacehobo @6a62 I've really struggled with studying them not because I have difficulty memorizing large amounts of trivia (I'm a very successful programmer, this is probably the one thing I do best) but because the questions are such brazen, transparent, bold racism
@whitequark @spacehobo @6a62 even reading through what you posted just now, I can just feel myself getting angry about it. I can't imagine having to study through the rage.
Ced@aud @spacehobo @6a62 @whitequark if you guys feel like trolling them: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/755094
Daniel QuinnThe petition has a grammatical error in it. It's "retroactively" not "retrospectively". The latter suggests that you simply look back on what failures the MPs would have been had they been expected to take the test.
@danielquinn Good catch. Not my petition, but even after your pointed it out it took me a while to actually see it 😜
@aud @6a62 @whitequark I mean, the passport-collection interview I gave was spookily similar to the grillings they used to give Chinese immigrants on Angel Island in California. "How many steps is it from your front door to your kitchen?", "Who lives five doors north of yours?" etc.
Daphne Preston-Kendal@whitequark You know that the impossibility of these questions is the point, right? This is one of the stupid hurdles put in place by successive governments pandering to barely concealed racism to stop people being able to live in the UK. The fact that most native-born British people couldn’t answer these is the point
지지 ᚠᚱᛖᛃᚨ Daniel 黄法官 CyReVolt@whitequark I bet noone but a few in the UK can answer those questions themselves. 😹
They could rather ask for reasons Boris Johnson belongs behind bars or smth like that. 🤫
Ridley @ WATCH LYCORECO@whitequark the british political system is so arcane that there are only so many questions about it that even have objective answers, so at some point they just run out of ideas and start writing random trivia I guess
@rcombs it's just racism
@whitequark we (the US) learned it from the best. except the brits also learned a lot of it from us, so,
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I actually knew this one! Though only because I looked it up yesterday while trying to put the range of an electric aircraft in context.
My stepmother probably knows it very well because she cycled it. I hope she got that question when she did the test!
Andre Videla@whitequark my favorite part about this question is that it's wrong! Measuring from the north most point on the left one and from the north east point on the second. The last one is measuring from the islands north of Scotland. Nothing is close to this 1400km figure.
@Andrev I think they mean road distance or some other such bullshit
lj·rk@whitequark Good thing, more than 61K would be a correct answer in any case /j
Pete Kirkham@ljrk @whitequark It was 42,590 according to the 2024/25 report https://www.nationaltrustjobs.org.uk/our-story.
@PeteKirkham @whitequark Whelp, so all answers wrong? xD
@ljrk @PeteKirkham I'm using the 2023 version to study
SnowFox@whitequark @ljrk @PeteKirkham Wow, the questions have gotten worse since I took it.
But yes: You're supposed to answer with what's in the book, even if it's now wrong (or was never correct, like "a NI card is a form of ID" which was apparently in the version before mine). I'd hope they'd stop asking questions where the book is wrong, but who knows.
abadidea@whitequark this is enormous finding-a-pretext energy
@0xabad1dea it is incredibly brazen and apparently the test used to be more in line with international practice but Davey Cameron (may he get fucked by the pig for the entire afterlife) considered it a big achievement to have really turned up the racism dial
@0xabad1dea having to force myself to stare at this drivel instead of doing Anything Else has been genuinely impacting my mental health the last few weeks. I can afford taking the test as many times as I want in terms of cash but in terms of physical health it means it's basically exclusive with paid work for about a week after an attempt
I think it’s actually less intentional. Most of the questions that you’ve posted were things I learned at an English public school (many are things I’ve subsequently forgotten), including the ones that are either factually incorrect or misleading. Public school boys are severely over represented in both the civil service and politics. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is genuinely what they think everyone in Britain knows.
They should have outsourced it to one of the companies that designs pub quizzes if they wanted something actually representative.
turmoni@whitequark this one is at least an easy one to answer, since just going for the lowest number should be right
You'd hope they wouldn't put questions in with "more than" answers and then punish you for a correct answer that's not close enough. You'd hope.
Kirtai 🏳️⚧️
Brian Danger Hicks@whitequark Well this is just a logic puzzle, if there's only one valid answer it must be that one.