“In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.”
Eighty-five English majors in Kansas read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House with a dictionary and their phones in hand. 58% could not follow it and still believed they would have no trouble with the whole 900-page novel. Almost all of them had scored above 80 on a 10th-grade reading test. About half are training to teach English in high school.