Mungyeong-ites might not be as refined as those big-city slickers from Andong, Yeongju and Sangju, but they got gumption:
After 271 failures, the 272nd attempt’s a charm. A nearly 70-year-old farmer in a rural village in North Gyeongsang Province has finally passed the formally written section of his driver’s license examination on the 272nd attempt. The North Gyeongsang Provincial Police Agency’s Driver’s License Examination Office in Mungyeong announced Thursday that Seo Sang-moon, who had applied for the academic part of the examination 272 times since August 2000, passed the examination conducted Tuesday afternoon.
Seo reminisced, “Being a repairman traveling around North Gyeongsang and Gangwon provinces, the driver’s license was a necessity, but I did not dare apply for the written examination because I am illiterate. Only after 2000, with the introduction of the oral exam, was I able to apply.”
7 Comments
LOL, I actually beat you to a post for once..high fives all around and the day gets marked on the calendar
Mungyeong? Ought to be renamed “Munmaeng”.
It only took me 2 tries! Woo-hoo! Go me!
Question: how high is illiteracy in Korea? I always hear the praise of its alphabet, which makes it sound like it ought to be really, really low.
Also, why didn’t the guy just hire someone to teach him, and get it over with?
Basically: this guy must be on the low tail of Korean IQ.
Hey! Lookit me and my flag! I’m a little communist!
sean the little communist wrote:
Question: how high is illiteracy in Korea? I always hear the praise of its alphabet, which makes it sound like it ought to be really, really low.
illiteracy is very low, as in very low single digits (supposedly 1 or 2 percent).
Also, why didn??t the guy just hire someone to teach him, and get it over with?
some people get in a rut in their lives, and something so simple for someone young might seem overwhelmingly daunting for someone older. think how many people over, say, sixty years old in the united states feel uneasy around computers.
Basically: this guy must be on the low tail of Korean IQ.
possibly, but not necessarily.
More than likely our hero comes from ultra humble circumstances and was unable to go to school for what ever reason while everyone else at least learned how to read and write. I have met a number of these people in my travels around Korea and few though they may be, they are not illiterate because they lack the mental capacity-just the opportunity in most cases. Besides, what difference does the license make, it obviously didn’t stop him from driving all that time before he finally passed. All the idiot drivers out on the road now are not guaranteed to be good drivers because they passed the written drivers license test-we all know that is not true.