display question

A question to which the questioner already knows the answer. Display questions are often used for instructional purposes to determine if students are able to "display" their knowledge of factual content.

Examples and Observations:

• "In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the--Anyone? Anyone?--the Great Depression, passed the--Anyone? Anyone?"
  (Ben Stein as the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986)



• Texas Ranger: The teacher asked me what was the capital of North Carolina. I said Washington, D.C.
  Cal Naughton, Jr.: Bingo.
  Ricky Bobby: Nice.
  Texas Ranger: She said "No, you're wrong." I said "You got a lumpy butt." She got mad at me and yelled at me and I pissed in my pants and I never did change my pee-pants all day. I'm still sitting in my dirty pee-pants.
  Cal Naughton, Jr.: I wet my bed until I was nineteen. There's no shame in that.
  (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, 2006)



• "The class was taught by an old and embittered veteran of the New York City public school system who had the looks and the attitude of, come to think of it, me these days. His form of instruction was Socratic, relentlessly so.
  
  "'What is the purpose of the steering wheel?' he asked.
  
  "The elderly Jewish ladies looked at their shoes. The Chinese stared into space. The black guys continued slanging each other.
  
  "'What is the purpose of the steering wheel?' the teacher asked again and got the same response."
  (P.J. O'Rourke, Driving Like Crazy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009)



• "Something that the media interview and the classroom interaction have in common is the use of display questions. . . . The purpose of a display question is to put knowledge or information on public display. In the classroom, this is an important way of transmitting and testing knowledge for teachers and students. In these display question situations such as classrooms and quizzes, the questioner follows up the answer by stating whether it is the correct one or not. However, in media interviews, . . . the follow up is very often left to the listener or viewer."
  (Anne O'Keeffe, Michael McCarthy, and Ronald Carter, From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007)