March 14, 2020

Jessie Wallace

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The American Dream is an ambition that many people born outside the U.S share. It’s a country full of opportunities where you can shape your future, receive aid if you need it, and have access to careers that allow you to succeed and thrive. However, the path to becoming a US citizen is not an easy one. There are several stages, each taking an exorbitant amount of time to complete. One of those stages is the U.S. Citizenship Test, or Naturalization Test.

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This assessment that decides the future of potential US citizens is only in English, with a few exceptions, and consists of answering ten questions. That’s not a lot, but that’s ten out of a hundred possibilities. Test takers must answer six correctly or they will need to wait another couple months to be able to try again.

Composed of civics questions about basic US history and government, the US Citizenship Test contains information that those born as US citizens learned in elementary school and then quickly forgot. In fact, according to a 1survey done by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and Lincoln Park Strategies, an average of only 36 percent of adults were able to pass it. That’s about two out of every three Americans who would be denied US citizenship. What’s even more surprising is that only 19 percent of adults between the ages of 18 to 45 were able to pass.

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Have you ever thought about how you would do? Here are ten questions from the list that could possibly be asked during the US Citizenship Test.

  1. What is the supreme law of the land?
    1. The Supreme Court
    2. The Bill of Rights
    3. The Declaration of Independence
    4. The Constitution
  2. Who was President during World War I?
    1. Theodore Roosevelt
    2. Woodrow Wilson
    3. Dwight D. Eisenhower
    4. Franklin Roosevelt
  3. The House of Representatives has how many voting members?
    1. 100
    2. 250
    3. 435
    4. 200
  4. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
    1. The Bill of Rights
    2. The First Chapter
    3. The Civil Rights
    4. The Declaration of Rights
  5. How many U.S. Senators are there?
    1. 200
    2. 50
    3. 100
    4. 250
  6. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
    1. The Founding fathers
    2. Abraham Lincoln
    3. James Monroe
    4. Thomas Jefferson
  7. How many Constitutional amendments are there?
    1. 32
    2. 27
    3. 50
    4. 24
  8. Who was President during the Great Depression and World War II?
    1. Franklin Roosevelt
    2. Dwight Eisenhower
    3. Theodore Roosevelt
    4. Harry S. Truman
  9. Before he was President, Eisenhower was a general. What war was he in?
    1. Korean War
    2. World War II
    3. Cold War
    4. World War I
  10. What is one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for?
    1. President of the United States
    2. One of the Founding Fathers
    3. One of the writers in the Declaration of Independence
    4. U.S. diplomat

How confident are you that you knew all of the answers or even just six of the answers. The truth is, many US citizens who have grown up in America couldn’t answer most of these without second-guessing themselves.

These facts are not topics that come up in day to day conversations. We all forget things like this as we live our lives; going to work, taking care of family members, and maintaining our homes. Add to that all the months of waiting for application processes, the uncertainties of the future, and for many, learning a new language that is considered one of the more difficult to master. It’s challenging for future US citizens to hold onto this knowledge, in the same way as so many current citizens have forgotten it.

Are you ready to see how you did on your US Citizenship Test?

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1: D  /  2: B  /  3: C  /  4: A  /  5: C  /  6: D  /  7: B  /  8: A  /  9: B /  10: D

1https://woodrow.org/news/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-citizenship-test/