Something I like to do once in a while is read a book that makes me laugh out loud to myself, leaving my fiancé or anyone around me wondering what the heck I’m doing. I recently read Richard Benson’s F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers, and I got such a kick out of it. This book is filled with actual test question responses from students who couldn’t answer them correctly and decided to have some fun instead.

F in Exams has student answers that cover the following major disciplines and subjects: Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Math, Business and Technology, Psychology, History and Geography, and English. Although I have favorite answers throughout the book, I’m biased towards the math and computer-related questions (so those are the ones I’ll be sharing below). Read what’s on the pictures first before reading my commentary on them below. For fun, I’ll provide the right answers too (which aren’t as funny to read, but why not — this is Nerdy Girl Makeup after all! haha).

After reading the answer on the left, I imagined poor Joanna in her office hunched over typing on her computer. LOL! A stand-alone computer is a computer that is not somehow connected to at least one other computer by some means. As a result, Joanna can only access files and programs locally stored on her computer (note that she wouldn’t have Internet either, since that would require a connection). But don’t be too sad for Joanna — a stand-alone computer has the advantage of being very secure, so it’s very unlikely she’ll get a virus or get hacked. As for the answer on the right, I had to read it again because I didn’t get it the first time (“CD-ROM? Romantic CD? Ohhh!” ). CD-ROM is a compact disc that contains data accessible by a computer. It’s an acronym for “Compact Disc Read-only Memory” — so CD-ROMs are not writable (CD-R and CD-RW are)! Now here are some math ones:

I used to be a geometry tutor in high school, so I thought the answer on the left was a funny smarta** response. The sum of all angles of a triangle is 180°, so the correct answer is simply a = 180° – 30° – 30° = 120°. What makes the answer on the right even funnier is that a stop sign is an octagon (it has 8 sides) — so the answer is even more incorrect! A six-sided polygon is also known as a hexagon. This last one is from the History section — I though it was a cute answer:

Correct answer: Plato!

I think what made this book even more entertaining for me is that I always took school very seriously, so it never occurred to me to come up with a quirky response to a difficult-to-answer question. For $9.95, F in Exams is well worth the laughs. My only complaint is that I wish the book was longer — I’m sure there’s a lot more awesome wrong answers out there!