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Originally Posted by Madam Broshkina
http://booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr/ is an interresting website that uses aggregated Facebook data about the favorite books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.
Some of the results, Lolita was favorite tome of the brightest students with an average SAT score of 1317. The lowest-scoring students liked the erotica author Zane, with an average score of 980. And strangely, the students who listed their favorite book as “The Bible” were smarter (1047) than those who said it was “The Holy Bible” (980).
Ironically, students who wrote “I don’t read” in the space for favorite books were only slots 14 from the bottom in terms of SAT scores, meaning that there were 13 other favorite books that theoretically made students “dumber” than not reading books at all.
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It's always irritated me that people historically have associated being "dumb" -- as in incapable of speech -- with being unintelligent. Now, of course, it's an accepted use of the word ... and that irritates me even more.
As for the article, that is very interesting. It's been a long time since I took the SAT .... I do know that my score was over 1300 (because the local paper actually listed the names of all the students in the area that got a score over 1300), but I could not for the life of me tell you what my favorite books were at the time.
I was heavily into Azimov and Agatha Christie about then ....