In the article “Lost in America,” which was originally published in the magazine Foreign Policy in 2006, Douglas McGray questions the efficiency of the United States on its lack of foreign knowledge. Foreign Policy is an award winning journalism magazine that presents trusted international analysis and information regarding to leaders from government, business, finance, and the academic world. Douglas Mcgray is a well-known commentator on political and cultural issues whose writing has appeared on many prestigious sources for example the New York Times, etc. In his article he shows how throughout history the U.S. has been in and out of foreign studies focusing more on its own nation and the effects of that, but staying nationally opportunities…show more content… In one of the statistics he uses he is explaining a certain area where a girl named Christina lives in America where more than a quarter of the population there was born outside of the United States and how the school children speak a variety of languages at home. In the passage he says, “In California, where Christina lives, more than 1 in 4 of the state’s residents were born outside the united States. Schoolchildren speak more than 60 languages at home. Globalization is everywhere you look” (351). With this being said McGray wants the audience to realize using the statistic that their country is not just full of Americans that speak English anymore but of many different cultures and how we have to adapt and adjust our curriculums accordingly. In another one of his statistics he talks about American troops in Afghanistan and possibly invading Iraq in 2002. His statistic says, “85 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans surveyed by the National geographic Society could not find either country on a map. And it gets worse: Sixty-nine percent failed to find Britain, 29 percent could not find the Pacific Ocean” (352). With this statistic we can see McGray was trying to pick at the audiences logic by making fun of America for its insufficient knowledge of world geography. McGray puts these facts and statistics in the article for…show more content… An example he uses is in the 1950’s when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik program. He says, “Shaken by Moscow’s achievement, American legislators passed the National Defense Education Act, funding everything from advanced scientific research to foreign-language study. For more than a decade after Sputnik’s flight, language education boomed in a way it never has since” (354). By using this historical factor Mcgray wants the audience to see how the government impacted language in such short time with the power it had in the past. Another example he used was a report the White House made in 1978. In the report, “Congressmen Paul Simon and Leon Panetta called on President Jimmy Carter to appoint a commission to assess the state of international studies” (355). With this historical factor McGray puts in the audiences heads that before even one of the most powerful men on the earth put forth a commission to asses the United States on Foreign studies. McGray puts these historical factors into his article because if gives the audience background information on the united states’ past experiences with foreign