We all have those fond (or not so fond) memories of getting our first drivers licence. Sitting in the car with our white knuckled parent beside us as we moved down the road, inches away from a crash. In today’s society, I would imagine that most of that is gone thanks to the abundance of driving schools.

One of the fringe benefits of being Canadian is that when you come to the UK you simply hand in your old license and they swap it for a UK license. No drivers test. No need to prove that you know how to get around a round-about and that you are not that person who was in the wrong lane for exiting, but tried to exit anyway cutting off 15 people. No need to prove that you have not come out of a driveway and run headlong into traffic the wrong way until you overcame the instinct to drive on the right. No need to prove that you are not the person who completely scraped up the rims on their rental car learning the hard way that UK roads were built for horses, not cars and are therefore rather tight.

Nope. Nothing to prove, they just hand it over. Please note, none of these things happened to me (smile).

But if you are American, different story. Drivers courses. Written tests and the worst penalty: a £400 fee. I guess this is Britain’s way of slowly recouping some of the war debt (The last payment being made in 2007).

But it could be worse. I now say to my American friends ‘at least we are not in China’:

If someone’s intestines are protruding from an open abdominal wound, should you: A. Put them back in place; B. Do nothing; or, C. Cover them with some kind of container and fasten it around the body?

The above is not from a first-year medical school exam, but is one of the 100 questions that both locals and foreigners could find on China’s written driver’s licence exam. (The answer, by the way, is C.)
Test candidates are given a booklet of 800 test questions, 100 of which appear on the actual exam. While the questions dealing with traffic signs are universally understood, others have singularly Chinese characteristics

Take the following example…

"What should a driver do when he needs to spit while driving? A. Spit through the window. B. Spit into a piece of waste paper, then put it into a garbage can. C. Spit on the floor of the vehicle." Answer? B.

Read the full article here.