Who’s the Russian Composer?

This one made me laugh out loud. BBC Radio 4’s lunch time program, “You and Yours”, is a variety magazine format focussing on issues that affect their listeners. One of the items in today’s program was about questions on the UK test for new citizens that have incorrect answers. A naturalized citizen who described himself as an academic gave several examples from the book issued to prospective new Brits. In this book there are practice questions and answers and quite a few of the answers were wrong.

At the end of the program the presenter repeated a story attributed to Peter Ustinov. When he was newly arrived in Britain he was once asked a question on some kind of test that went like this, “Name one Russian Composer.” Ustinov answered, “Rimsky-Korsakov.” When his test was returned, the question was marked “Incorrect, the correct answer is Tchaikovsky.”