The study cited is a survey of young people who have no reason to know anything about Britain. They were educated in public schools by leftist professors and are as ignorant as the day is long. Their only knowledge of life outside the US is from TV and Hollywood, which are also the private preserve of leftist mental midgets. They have not yet launched themselves out into the real world.
But that will change as soon as they go to work.
I would posit that average Americans know more in practical terms about life outside the US than do most of our international counterparts. Most US bases are outside the US, so everyone who has ever served has traveled, and has interacted with his foreign military counterparts.
In the petroleum business, much of the work is overseas, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that the welder next door has done a tour of duty in the middle east, or South America. The driller down the street spent years in the Gulf of Thailand and the North Sea. The engineers in the neighborhood work with mostly foreign colleagues, and many of them have done their time overseas.
And I am surprised at the numbers of average folks around town who have gone overseas on missionary trips, or nursing charity trips, it seems every other church in town is sponsoring such trips.
You can go to the remotest Andean village and you will find American adventure tourists, American preachers, American Peace Corps types, American geologists and oilmen, American bankers, just doing what they do. That is one of the big complaints from leftists worried about "cultural imperialism", that there is no where left in the world you can go to escape Americans. Thats because we and our businesses and our products are everywhere.
We aren't ignorant from lack of international exposure, we are the most international people in the world. We are "ignorant" because we don't subscribe to this writer's prejudices about the world. And we don't.
Curring bump.
Proof of your insight is available to anyone who inquires what the writer would say about an internationally unsophisticated, Hindi-speaking wallah from Hindustan, or a Quechua-speaking citizen of Peru who doesn't know where Dulles International is, or how to get to Gatwick airport from downtown London.