Question 6 in the BBC's Quiz: How well would you have done at GCSE? is as follows:
FRENCH: Read this extract from a letter to a local newspaper. What point is the writer making? Choose the correct phrase to complete the sentence.
"Pour réduire le nombre d’accidents dans le centre-ville, le conseil municipal propose d’agrandir la zone piétonne."
The writer tells us that the council wants to ...
A - Reduce pedestrian-only areas in the town center.
B - Make the town center safer for pedestrians.
C - Increase fines for motorists who cause accidents in the town center.
You don't need to be a genius to guess that the council proposes to enlarge the pedestrianized area. But that option is not on there, so what do you do? We can rule out A and C (clearly incorrect), so that leaves you with B (which happens to be the correct answer) but that is not a literal translation and is stating the blindingly obvious anyway: "They are going to reduce the number of accidents by making it safer, duh". You could argue that increasing motoring fines or reducing the pedestrian-only areas also reduce the number of accidents (maybe it's cyclist vs pedestrian accidents).
The answer is as follows:
Literally, the sentence means: "To reduce the number of accidents in the town centre, the local council is proposing to expand the pedestrian area."
Well why didn't you fucking offer that as choice B?
----------------------------------
Question 4 is a load of shit as well:
State the denary representation of the binary number 10111010
A - 157
B - 143
C - 186
It takes you a split second to realise that a binary number ending in -0 must be an even number and there's only one even number on the list. FFS.
---------------------------------
The history question blows as well - Dido was a pop singer in the 1990s, not a queen in some ancient fable.
Debate Magazine
