Did I just bust "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"?

You’re smarter than Jeff Foxworthy.

That puts you at least 2nd grade level.

Yay, you know the difference between species, genus and family. There are so few people that know that, I would give you an A in highschool science.

I think you’re making the question out to be more technical that it actually was intended to be. For a biologist, the question would be asking for the actual taxon “Hominidae”, but I doubt that’s the kind of answer they were looking for.

The contestant said “Silverback”. What he said is definitely wrong NOT giving more detail!

The word Silverback may refer to:
-Silverback gorilla(males)
-Silverback jackal
-Silverback betta
-And so on.

I didn’t watched that show but I hope he/she didn’t win much money since he/she just gave a wrong answer and didn’t deserve that prize.

Baboon, gorilla or MIL all would have been winners! From www.wiki.com/silverback.html…

“silverback refers to the prominent display of raised silver hair on the backs of great apes such as gorillas, baboons and MIL’s”

Baboon, gorilla and orangutans are all in the same family, the great ape family (Ponga-whatever.) However, baboon or orangutan does not equal gorilla, as they are different species within the same family. The specific question was “Which ape family does this animal (insert picture, in which you can’t even see his back) belong in”, not “what other animals share the same characteristic of the silver back gorilla.” If that had been the quesion per what @Doctor_D said, a correct answer could have been a jackal or a betta.

@DominicX The point of the show is to see if you’ve retained anything from the 5th grade. If they ask “What is the capital of such and such country” and you give a name of a city in that country, but it’s not the capital, then it’s wrong. If they’d wanted something as vague as “Gorilla,” they should have just said, “What kind of animal is this,” not, specifically “What family does this ape belong to.” “Great Ape,” is not that hard to remember, but homid or ponga-whatever, is. They actually get a little tough sometimes! I felt sorry for this one guy because he wasn’t all that smart to begin with and they asked, “What is 10^10 X 8^10….” he blew it badly. He came up with something stupid like, 174 which, of course wasn’t even on the same planet, much less in the ball park, but I couldn’t have given the right answer without having at least paper and pencil.