“What Orbits the Earth?”

• Silent002
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 pm

  Oh my…

  I was shocked when this guy had to use his “Ask the Audience” on this, and I almost fell off my chair when those results came in… wow.
  You’ve really got to wonder what they’re teaching in French schools when things like this happen.

  Oh and cool, you can swear on the French version of millionaire!

• biltmore
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm

  Hell, people are like this all over the world, not just france.

• Jeff
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:28 pm

  Fifty-freakin-six percent?!? That sound you heard was Copernicus and Galileo spinning in their graves.

  “Eppur si muove!”

• Gridman
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:31 pm

  Apparently, they spent too much time making sure the French language is not infected by foreign infliuences and not enough time making sure basic science is taught in schools.

• Phil
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:33 pm

  French sentence construction confuses me too sometimes.

• Miss Cellania
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:35 pm

  I am shocked at how many thought the sun orbited the earth, and I am even more shocked at how much of the dialogue I understood.

• Anita
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:49 pm

  Gotta give the guy some credit, he went with the audience. Apparently America is no better … USA Today did a poll a couple years ago and ~50% said the sun orbited the earth, and less than 10% had ever heard of genes/genetics.

• shawn bell
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:50 pm

  Does Copernicus need to posthumously bitchslap france?

  Also, i can’t really tell because of all the ambient noise, but i believe he says ‘merde’ after gets it wrong. Which means shit.

• quinnn
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 pm

  I can’t even think of what to comment.

  Amazing…

• Aleki
  February 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 pm

  Actually, I thought that the whole universe orbited around France… Are you trying to tell me it doesn’t? Merde!!!

• natalie
  February 4th, 2007 at 1:14 am

  It’s like my 11th grade history class all over again.

• jami
  February 4th, 2007 at 3:15 am

  this is a joke, right?

• Raluca
  February 4th, 2007 at 5:30 am

  Is not a joke… Sad…

• gail
  February 4th, 2007 at 7:58 am

  Hah! Me too, Miss C! And he definitely does say “merde.”

  I agree with everyone who says “it could happen here.” I’m a teacher.

• ted
  February 4th, 2007 at 8:21 am

  You could blame his mistake on nerves. We can forget even the simplest things under pressure. But that audience was either stupid or malevolent.

  “Disons le soleil, ma chere.”

  “Oui, oui!”

• Moon
  February 4th, 2007 at 10:43 am

  Before we get all high and mighty about this (and BOY I am glad to the French are just as dumb as we are), REMEMBER that something like 67% of high schoolers can’t find Washington, DC on a map.

• Miss Cellania
  February 4th, 2007 at 11:11 am

  My 9-year-old just asked what I was laughing at. I explained the question, and she said “the moon” right off. I told her about the audience survey, and she said “oh, come on.” She thought I was pulling her leg!

• Fritzo
  February 4th, 2007 at 11:37 am

  About that USA Today poll…funny how I just searched their archives and found no listing for a poll about the sun orbiting the Earth.

  I just asked my 6 year old son and he knew the answer

• Becki
  February 4th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

  The poor darling frogs were confused because they’d always been taught that France is the center of the universe.

• biltmore
  February 4th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

  About that USA Today poll…funny how I just searched the internet and found out the information on the poll which was done by telephone. It took me 1 minute to find it. It was done thru June 25 and June 27 in 1999.

  http://www.disc.wisc.edu/newcatalog/study.asp?tid=13856&id=7964

  Also, here’s another link, but this guy credits the New York Times at a recent study, which is what I think Anita was thinking about …

  http://prezkennedy.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=234

  And if you are registered with The Times, here’s the link to the article :

  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html

  Funny how it only take a minute to type in the right words in a search engine to find an answer. Funny.

• megmeg
  February 4th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

  lol I guess I’ll have to find the videos on the stupidity of American citizens. When asked to point out France/Iraq/Pakistan and other countries, they marked those countries as being Australia. There are idiots in every country.

• tomas
  February 4th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

  I think the audience plotted against the dope. I can see them tittering with their electronic voting devices.

• dacon
  February 4th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

  @megmeg

  Congratulations, they cant find countries they live in (I can, I wasnt educated down there), but how many people are still taught that everything revolves around the world? A new level of stupidity.

• Maurice DeSquootpeep
  February 4th, 2007 at 3:37 pm

  Mouen ze sosuee chevalour wae- speecee weeshesheshe.

  oui?

• Thorbjørn Kühl
  February 4th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

  Actually as I’ve understood it, two bodies orbit around each other, but the object with the smaller mass orbits “more” than the one with the larger mass. So one could argue that all the answers are somewhat correct although the moon orbits “the most”.

• MrPumpernickel
  February 4th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

  Thorbjørn, yes the earth is affected by the gravitational pull of the moon, but to say that it orbits around the moon is a fallacy. If anything the earth wobbles as the moon orbits around it.

  Two stellar bodies that truly orbit eachother are for instance binary star systems where the stars are each caught in each others’ gravitational pull. This only really happens though when the two bodies are of pretty much equal mass and exert pretty much equal gravitational pull.

• BORT??
  February 4th, 2007 at 7:07 pm

  I admit, not everyone in the world has to know the answer… but damn, how do you wind up on French Millionaire, knowing so little? That doesn’t happen on Jeopardy.

• ZandarKoad
  February 4th, 2007 at 7:59 pm

  I don’t know enough about French contexts to comment on the stupidity of the guest/audience on this question. The poster translated it as: “What orbits the earth?” If you were to change the word ‘orbit’ to an active verb, then the answer would indeed be the sun… Not that the word has ever been or ever could be properly used in such a fasion. I just don’t know enough about french to know that they guy was an idiot. For all I know it could be a poorly phrased question.

  Just thought I’d throw in some dissonance.

• Ethos
  February 4th, 2007 at 8:25 pm

  Well, at least 42% of the audience was actually attempting to help out another human being by doing the right thing.

  Just to note: In the European versions of ‘Who wants to be a Millionare?’ the audience quite often will vote for the wrong answer on purpose, just to mess with the contestant. Thus proving that people from France are not only stupid, but they’re mean too. (Not really news to anyone.)

  Hooray for France!

• Brent
  February 4th, 2007 at 9:26 pm

  The French are stupid, or they are jerks. Either way, it sucks.

• Huh?
  February 4th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

  “What orbits the earth?” is a pretty stupid question anyway. It all depends on the observer’s frame of reference. If the observer is on the earth, then he clearly sees the sun orbiting the earth. If he were on the sun, then he’d see the earth orbiting around the sun. If he were in the vicinity of the SMBH in the center of our galaxy, he’d see the center of mass of the earth-moon system and the sun orbit around their common center of mass (which would lie somewhere inside the sun’s atmosphere on the imaginary axis connecting the two), which in turn would orbit the SMBH, etc…

• jami
  February 5th, 2007 at 12:28 am

  but “huh?”, the sun appears to orbit the earth only because the earth rotates. your comment suggests that it’s okay to fail to understand what is happening within one’s frame of reference and call it by the right name so long as it all looks the same.

  i’m shocked that someone who doesn’t know this got on wwtbam, but the france-bashing in this thread is disgusting. i’m sure these are the same people who went batshit crazy when alex dared to post a clever pro-democrat political cartoon.

• Huh?
  February 5th, 2007 at 4:31 am

  Jami, yeah, you got me there. The FoR examples I used were valid only if the solar system consisted solely of Sun, Earth and Moon. In reality, there’s other planets whose trajectories wouldn’t make any sense at all if the earth was anywhere near the center. But I still think it’s wrong to say that the Moon orbits the Earth (and I therefore maintain that the question was stupid). As #25 pointed out, both bodies orbit their common center of mass. If one simplifies these things so much, then people are going to have a problem trying to understand related things. Ever wondered why the tidal cycle on Earth is ~12 hours, not ~24? No way to explain that within the Moon-orbits-Earth model.

• gail
  February 5th, 2007 at 8:17 am

  A reader (Dave) sent me a UK episode of Millionaire in which a lady tries to decide whether the moon is bigger than an elephant and gets it wrong, so it’s definitely not a French phenomenon. I’m sure this is worldwide.

• gail
  February 5th, 2007 at 8:18 am

  A more literal translation of the French question is “What is it that gravitates around the earth?”

• Monster
  February 5th, 2007 at 8:48 am

  Here we have a video with a French person doing something stupid. For once I thought there would be no “Americans are so stupid” posts since the video is French. And yet here we are again, bashing on Americans, even though they have nothing to do with this video. You people are pathetic.

• Justin
  February 5th, 2007 at 10:03 am

  What I don’t understand is why was this a “harder” question. That seems like one of the gimmie questions leading up to 1,000. But he walked away with 1,500 euros. Odd…

• Andy
  February 5th, 2007 at 10:23 am

  http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?p=49177

  Sorry Gail, swing and a miss.

• Supersohe
  February 5th, 2007 at 11:04 am

  I would have picked the sun too if i were in the audience. If he doesn’t know the answer to a simple question like that one, he doesn’t deserve to win any money.

• redstripe
  February 5th, 2007 at 11:42 am

  Right. As others have said, in the French version, it is more common for the audience to be mischievous when they vote–typically, the more simple the question, the more likely it is that they will purposefully swing their vote. It’s just another part of the game–it doesn’t make them any more or less stupid or mean than American audiences.

  Furthermore, he did indeed say “merde,” which is most closely translated to “s**t” in English, but it is nowhere near as strong. It is much closer (in strength) to “damn” over here–schoolchildren can say the word and not get in trouble.

• redstripe
  February 5th, 2007 at 11:44 am

  Oh, and the elephant-moon thing is complete bunk also (as Andy suggested). Here’s a better link:

  http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/gameshows/millionaire.asp

• aliocha
  February 5th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

  ok, i have to clear a thing or two about this french bashing for i work on the same channel of the millionaire, writing questions and trivias for another quizz show that is even more popular around here…

  it is a little bit embarrassing to explain and i’m not even sure i’m allowed to do so, i don’t know if there’s any kind of clearance on this type of info…
  the candidates are casted : if you’re a ph.d. and you show up to earn some easy bucks they’ll give you a polite “ok, but go fuck yourself please”… the smarter and educated you are, the more chance you have to make big money and it’s certainly not an option for a tv producer… moreover dumb people are good for audience… so the contestants are casted to ressemble to their target : very popular, not educated, tv-smarts not booksmarts… still, if they are more stupid than your audience, it’s better because cruelty works…

  the french people who wants something more hardcore will look at “questions pour un champion” (question for a champion) which exists since the 80’s… there you will see brutal smartasses capable of telling in which year heiddegger theorized the dasein, who are specialists of cucurbitaceae, the elizabethan era, or whatever… but what you will win is a bunch of encyclopedias, not a million euro…

  this may sound pretty much cynical but, hey, it’s TV show designed to sell mass-advertisement, not a GNO =)

• Jim
  February 5th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

  Noobs…Close the ports and the euro we dont want them infecting us with there nublets.

• Kevo
  February 7th, 2007 at 10:48 am

  Of the typical trivia-type questions I have found people are most ignorant on space/solar system/astronomy than anything else… BY FAR.

  Most people don’t have a clue about anything in space…. and yes that includes what orbits what. (or even what orbiting really is)

• Agamemmnon
  March 15th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

  HAHAH OMFG….every comment i have read so far is one of three things:

  1-Equally stupid as the french guy
  2-Empty and senseless
  3-Even more stupid

  Yeah i like the world i reaaaally like it hahah, one guy telling shit because he/it doesnt know a pre-school question and other guys telling elementary school stuff to explain the relations between matter hahah i like it

• Assomoswola
  May 17th, 2008 at 2:41 am

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