How much do you know about Brazil?

What I can't understand is why the English-speaking world insists on spelling Brasil...with a "z".

When did that custom start...and isn't it about time...to end it?

Lex Wadelski
Austin, Texas

Thanks for doing this. The results were surprising. I'm Brazilian and grew up in NY. NYers are pretty savvy, and I think overall the tourists who come to NY are also more in tune with the world at large. So I wonder how different the results would be if you had quizzed 50 random people elsewhere.

Seth, I have enjoyed and to some extent related to everything you have written from Brazil. My wife is Brazilian and I lived there from Jan 2001 until Oct 2003 (visited several times previous and my Portuguese is fluent). The things people assumed there about the United States were at times annoying, at times infuriating and still other times humorous. Hard to take it in stride all the time.

Regarding the geography question, although it is true Americans seem to lack in this regard, I wonder why Brazilians think we should know so much about their country. In general, they really don't know that much about the United States. There are roughly 200 countries in the world. Does any Brazilian know the capitals of all of them? I'm sure someone does, but that isn't common knowledge.

Keep up the excellent writing. Sheds light on life in Brazil for Americans and others.

If you had asked this Minneapolitan, I would have answered Brasilia. And then to show off I would have said Rio de Janeiro before that, and Salvador before that. I heard someone say once that Brasil is number two in everything, but no one seems to know it. It continues to surprise me how true I find this. If you asked what the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere is, I doubt many people would know it's São Paulo.

Doug Hamlin
Minneapolis

Ask a Brazilian how many states Brazil has (26 plus the federal district, Brasilia)...in the ten years I lived in Brazil, I only met two Brazilians to correctly answer the question. Another funny thing: I remember thumbing through a school geography book. The chapter about the disparity between the northern and southern hemispheres, the line delineating the north and south, took a severe dip under Australia to place it in the northern hemisphere.

Nice. I've always liked that story about Reagan. I remember reading that, the next day, one of the papers ran the headline "The people of Bolivia welcome the President of Canada".

Seth,

I lived for one year, back in 1989, in the country side of Vermont (if Vermont has anything other than countryside), and it was really annoying when people asked me if we had elevators or if we saw monkeys on the streets.

I must confess that nobody ever questioned me if the capital was Buenos Aires, perhaps because they had the slightest idea that Buenos Aires even existed, but this was back in Vermont.

Perhaps what heppens is that most of the Brazilians tend to judge or compare themselves based on someone's economical power, and when we do this across borders this may be very well misleading. Chances are that the average American could have been to more places than the average Brazilian, just because Americans have more means to travel. So when perhaps a mason (to give an example - let's say somebody uneducated) travels to Brazil, the Brazilians who CAN travel think we are talking about the social extract, when we aren't. A Brazilian mason wouldn't have the means to own a bicycle, alas travel to another country.

So I believe that whole prejudice comes from twisted comparisons, because only cultured Brazilians have the means to travel (mid-class up - and when I mean mid-class I mean College Degree), while in the US perhaps this isn't a widespread truth, because more uneducated people have much higher income than very educated people in Brazil.

Interesting article! Funny and at the same time sad, I thought we all learned basic geography in 2nd grade.. in defense of Americans if you did the same poll in Ibirupuera Park in São Paulo I'll bet the winning response would be Miami is the capital of Estados Unidos and it is in the state of California. Lula has probably made more funny ridiculous statements then any Brazilian president in history, Brazilians joke about them the same way we did with Bush. In defense of the Washington post Sao Paolo isn't bad at all, the Spanish speaking countries call it San Pablo, in Brazil you'd be incorrect if you wrote Sao Paulo instead of São Paulo. In Português (Portuguese) its Brasil com s, and Nova Iorque (New York) and Estados Unidos (United States).