It's not much, but enough for the Daily Mail to condemn them instantly as "not tough enough". It also complained that there was not enough history, either, under the headline, "The citizenship test you can't fail".
The Guardian was concerned the test was too hard. It talked to teachers who didn't know that 112 was an emergency services phone number. It reported one teacher who said she had two degrees but could not answer the question asking which kind of court used juries.
The Times tended to side with The Guardian. It scratched its head over the question, "who is the head of the Church of England?" and decided no one knew for sure. It's either Christ or the Queen, depending who you ask.
All of which provided good knockabout fun for newspapers. Few could resist drawing up their own whimsical quiz questions either. In contrast, here is a very serious one: would Stephen Lawrence have scored higher on a citizenship test than those who attacked and killed him?
The answer is almost certainly yes. Which ought to give papers pause to wonder about the urgent task in citizenship, integration and racial tension. It doesn't have much to do with daft quibbles about what people applying for naturalisation ought to know.
BBC News Online was feeling positive last week. "Teenagers are more literate than they were 10 years ago," it declared, reporting a large study of exam papers. The researchers concluded that young people use "better punctuation, more complicated sentences and are better spellers" than their counterparts from 1994.
Less good news from the Daily Telegraph. "Pupils' punctuation is so poor it leaves examiners baffled" went the headline covering a different report from English GCSE examiners. Even "quite fluent 16-year-olds" write at length without any full stops or commas, apparently.
Mixed messages, then? Not really. Even the Telegraph reporter had to admit that examiners felt young people's use of apostrophes and speech marks and their understanding of sentence structure had all improved. Perhaps someone was just feeling grumpy when they wrote the headline.
