I dyed my hair for Halloween. I specifically looked for a brand that wouldn't be permanent. When I was finished, I looked at the box again. It said "permanent" in fairly large letters in two different places, and I'd failed to notice both of them.

From the outside, this might look like "failing basic reading comprehension". But I don't think that's what's going on.

Side note: what color did you dye your hair then?

Red. I was going for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Sane#/media/File:Davis...

(I got lucky. I really like how it turned out, so I'm glad it was permanent.)

In related news: 80% of adults fail basic reading comprehension tests, teens fare much better.

Baselines matter.

Correlating the word "Ad" with the concept "this isn't an actual search result, this is something we were paid to put up here" usually takes someone coming along and spelling out the link. They can read the word, but the association may not have been intuitively made before.

It's just another part of learning.

> In related news: 70% of teenagers fail basic reading comprehension tests?

Or they just don't care. Or they're blasted with ads so much all the time anyway working out the differences just isn't that important to them.

No care enoufh to know? They were asked about the links and didn't identify them as ads.

So? Do you put effort into things you don't really give a damn about? It would appear that you don't.