

14% of U.S. Adults Can't Read (63% of Prison Inmates) - crocus
http://www.livescience.com/culture/090110-illiterate-adults.html

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drcode
Of course, the headline is misleading- It should read "14% of U.S. Adults Lack
Basic Prose Literacy Skills"

Even then, I had a hard time finding meaningful info on exactly what
constitutes "BPLS", beyond some vague statements in the article. If someone
can find some sample questions from this "BPLS" test, please comment on this
thread.

The little I could find out about BPLS on a brief Googling suggests that a
person that can read given the conventional definition of "reading" can still
fail a "BPLS" test relatively easily.

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gravitycop
More information here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States>

 _A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy
interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever
commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in September 1993. It
involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for
age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or
rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S.
population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult
Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-
level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate
easily identifiable pieces of information."_

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randallsquared
Wow. That doesn't sound like it has much to do with reading, specifically.
Frankly, it's more like saying "nearly 25% of Americans are well below average
intellectually", which doesn't even seem very remarkable if the top of the
curve isn't especially flat.

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eru
You should be careful switching between absolute and relative statements.

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patio11
Well -- not quite as bad as it sounds. 25.5 million people living in America
are both foreign born and don't speak English at home. Roughly 85% of them are
adults, and roughly half of them (I am going to say probably skewing towards
adults) report that they have difficulty with English.

Which if we do the math is something like 3% of the US population not being
able to read English primarily because they're not able to speak it. Bad news
for them, but the reasons for their problem (and the solutions to address it)
are pretty different than for the rest of the illiterate population.

See official Census data:

[http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/foreignborn...](http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/foreignborn.pdf)

~~~
gravitycop
From the first reference link at the Wikipedia link I gave earlier:

<http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf>

 _In considering the results, the reader should keep in mind that this was a
survey of literacy in the English language — not literacy in any universal
sense of the word. Thus, the results do not capture the literacy resources and
abilities that some respondents possess in languages other than English._

