How many Continents Are There?

last night, there was a lively argument as to the exact amount of continents out there in the world.

where as my schooling taught me 7, vic's said 5, and ive read arguments for 4 and 6 as well...

without going into it too far, this wiki graphic does what 1000 words might...

what say you, brave forum member?

(interestingly, the 7 continents i guessed, are the the same seven the above graphic shows...)

its all a conspiracy...there are no continents.

7

That was a question in the WAIS-III IQ Test that I took for a laugh on a clinical placement last year. For full marks, they accepted 6 or 7 (weren't too bothered about divvying up the Americas). I think. I'd go with 7 to be on the safe side though.

euroasia....pfff!

The argument's the same whether at pub level or at academic level.
I'd always say 7.

http://www.countriesandcities.com/continents/

3.

eurasia, eastasia and oceania

carlos
Q: how long is a piece of string?

A: twice the length from the middle to the end!

Official answer is 7.

Cool people know it's just the 1 - Australia!

depends how old your encyclopaedia is. Gondwana?

OK, so how do you take one away from twenty-nine and get thirty?

Yurop! ha!

exactafuckinly right

And another thing, type "French military victories" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky"

that is good.

should you get a funny page about defeats?

Yeah, they beat you in losing in Vietnam by almost 30 years (and several trillion dollars)

YEEEHAAWW!

And another thing, type "French military victories" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky"

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/American_military_victories
It is estimated that, for every shot an American soldier fired, somewhere between 350,000 to 1 million British soldiers were killed. This habit has continued to the present day - in modern times it is called 'friendly fire'

so, between 4 and 7 continents? hurrah! we were all right! that's what i call a result :D

5
a e i o u

Ha, as if this has ended up on the forum Carlos!
I think people educated wholly in England were mostly taught 5, weren't they?
The OED says:

5. a. One of the main continuous bodies of land on the earth's surface.
[SIZE=2]Formerly two continents were reckoned, the Old and the New; the former comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa, which form one continuous mass of land; the latter, North and South America, forming another. (These two continents are strictly islands, distinguished only by their extent.) Now it is usual to reckon four or five continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, North and South; the great island of Australia is sometimes reckoned as another, and geographers have speculated on the existence of an Antarctic Continent. [/SIZE]

That was a question in the WAIS-III IQ Test that I took for a laugh on a clinical placement last year. For full marks, they accepted 6 or 7 (weren't too bothered about divvying up the Americas). I think. I'd go with 7 to be on the safe side though.

What kind of IQ test is that? The number of continents requires knowledge, not intelligence. You could get a total moron to remember the number of continents (in itself an almost completely useless peice of information) it wouldn't make them more intelligent.

..Ooo, that was a bit of rant.

Sorry.

I get like that when anyone mentions IQ tests. Question 1 on any IQ test should be "What is an Intelligence Quotient?"

That's the bog standard one for all baseline cognitive assessments. There was a 'general knowledge' section, which is clearly culturally biassed, and this is one of the main criticisms levelled at the assessment.

I'm a bit cynical about IQ as a holistic measure of 'intelligence', but it does seem to provide a reliable measure of cognitive strengths and weaknesses over a huge cross-section of the populus. There are loads of different sections - working memory, pattern recognition, verbal, mathematical, reasoning, blah, blah.

I think you can pick up versions for use in other cultures...

Interestingly, IQ tests show a steady increase in average intelligence over the years. I was surprised, what with dumbing down and shit, but apparently more people are adapting to the demands of the types of questions in the test eg. pattern recognition is improving, because people are having to work with computers, which demands an understanding of a hierarchical approach to information organization.

Hmmm.