Q. I am 75 and a year or two ago I renewed my driver’s license at the Norco Department of Motor Vehicles office. I studied hard for the written test and … none wrong. A miracle! Why? For weeks I took every online practice test I could find. I read and reread the DMV manual. There are thousands of questions related to safe driving that could be asked. So why was I (or ANYONE else) asked a question citing an obscure law with little to do with the safe operation of a motor vehicle? The question had to do with the disposal of a dog carcass in a rural area. No kidding. I guessed at the answer and somehow got it right. As soon as I got home, I went through the DMV manual to find out how I had missed this important road-safety law during my studies. After a lengthy search, I found the one sentence that mentions the disposal of an animal carcass. That question should NOT be on any DMV written test. Someone with clout needs to contact the DMV and petition to remove nonsensical questions such as this one from its tests.
– Glenn Alsdorf, Chino Hills
A. Honk is a little light on clout today, and he supposes the purpose of such in-the-weed questions, Glenn, is to get drivers to do what you did – dig deep into the Driver’s Handbook.
All of the answers are in there, said Andrew Finkel, a DMV spokesman, and the tests are “accurate in their assessment and fair to all (and help) confirm that drivers have the knowledge needed to safely operate a vehicle.”
The tests were last updated two years ago. The DMV analyzes questions to try and dump too-difficult ones, those that have been used too often and any that should be rewritten, Finkel said.
Q. Hi Honk: Wondering if you could tell us what is on the west side of the 241 Toll Road that, from a distance, looks like a couple of good-sized plots of land covered with orderly placed white crosses. Maybe a couple of miles north of the 133? We were traveling south and the two patches of markers were off to the right side…
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