50 Cent has been taking jabs at Floyd Mayweather again, including a new take on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in which Fiddy challenged Floyd to read a single page from a Harry Potter book without screwing it up. Floyd is a fighter, not a scholar, so who really cares if he can read well or not? None the less, this got us curious about if there actually is any data suggesting that fighters are, as a whole, less intelligent than the general population. The results may or may not surprise you…
Before we talk about the results from the study by the Center Reporting Academic Performance, I want to take a moment to introduce Mrs Shay. She’s like a character right out of a movie, if it was a movie about underprivileged kids in Chicago who come from abusive and broken homes. Mrs Shay teaches 1st grade, and despite the fact that she has to spend $1000 of her own money each year on supplies for the kids who would have to otherwise go without them, she never complains. She’s got a smile on her face and a sassy attitude. Unlike any other authority figure in their lives, the kids actually respect her and they litsen to her. None the less, the school that Mrs Shay teaches at has some of the worst literacy rates in the country.
Despite the fact that Mrs Shay’s students score among the worst when it comes to basic reading skills, they still score higher than the average professional combat sports athlete. An organization named Center Reporting Academic Performance has put together a study that compiled the aggregate data of literacy rates among numerous professions, hobbies, age groups and more. Essentially the goal was to try to find links between groups that had higher literacy rates than others, and to help balance things out.
Mrs Shay’s first grade class scored 23 out of 100 which meant that the average student in the class is able to read about 23 out of 100 typical everyday words. (The children are given slightly easier words than the adult groups, so it’s not a perfect 1:1 comparison.)
To put that into context, lawyers typically score 100 (or 99 for a mis-pronunciation) and have a much more difficult bank of words than school children.
The part that’s really troublesome is when you look at the combined scores of combat athletes. This includes MMA fighters, boxers, collegiate wrestlers, jiu jitsu players and kickboxers. This group was given the same word bank as the children, and they scored 17 out of 100. So for every 100 words, the typical combat fighter is able to read 17 of them. Remember, the fighters were given the same word bank as the children, not the lawyers.
So why is it that a group of troubled, underprivileged school children in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America are better at reading than adult professional athletes? The study gives us the data, but it doesn’t tell us WHY. What do you think?
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