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Fact vs. Opinion

Does anyone know the difference anymore?

Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox
The Left Is Right
3 min readJan 11, 2025

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Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Years ago, my friend used to teach an SAT prep class. I don’t know if the SATs are still given at the end of high school, or if people even know what they were: Student Aptitude Test. There was a math part and an English part, with extra ones for specific subjects like physics. 800 was a perfect score on any one test; 1600 was the top score students could get.

The grades on the SATs were used by some colleges to judge who to admit to their school. A low SAT score limited the number of colleges students were probably going to be able to get into. A high SAT score opened a lot of doors.

SAT scores only reflected academic ability. My second husband got 800 out of 800 on the physics SAT, which he took a year after he’d taken the course. In other words, he took physics in his junior year of high school, then took the SAT in it after his senior year. He was a brilliant student. He just sucked as a friend, husband, and father. There are no tests for that.

Getting back to fact vs. opinion, though, my friend taught the English part of the prep course. I distinctly remember her telling me one of the questions determining fact vs. opinion: “The United States is the greatest country on earth.” Fact or opinion?

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The Left Is Right
The Left Is Right

Published in The Left Is Right

Right wing politics are destroying democracy in America. If we want freedom, we must think and vote blue.

Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox
Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox

Written by Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox

Former English professor ponders life, love, and how to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

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