Blaming the eduycational system or the mass media for this strikes me as missingb the mark.

I doubt very much if many of us actually learnt all that much of this stuff at school. Geography involved learning a certain amount about particular aspects of the subject - some parts of the world, some categories of geographical processes etc.

But most of what we knowin the way of facts like where places are gets picked up as we go, from what we read and what we see on TV, and to a much lesser extent what we do and where we go. Natural curiosity - surely one of the defining characteristics of human beings.

And the astonishing thing about surveys like this is that evidently, for a great number of people, this natural curiosity just doesn't appear to be natural at all.