Drifting a bit here, but Google "spaghetti farms BBC" and you get the YouTube clip of the story.
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My suggestion that it's the English language with its omnipresence that might be screwing up the brains of kids in England and the USA falls dow because Australia scored a lot higher, and so did Northern Ireland. In fact talk about the UK doing badly is a bit unfair, since the study only had England scoring really low, just fractionally above the USA - the Scots and Welsh kept out of it. I suspect that they might have had the same kind of result as Northern Ireland.