I'd kill to know what the questions are, because I'll bet they're incredibly culturally biased. When one of my kids was very young they were in a study which required me to fill out a survey of their spoken vocabulary. The list was of 100 words, and one of them was "dish". Which, outside of that one nursery rhyme, is not a word I've ever ever used in my life. My one year old certainly didn't know it!
Maybe just our southern usage but we say dishes all the time...take the dishes to the sink, set the table please the dishes in the dishwasher are clean. But then we refer to plates, cups, silverware, bowls as specific items...from the nursery rhyme they would probably have known singular dish as a plate or serving platter is also a serving dish.
So culturally and maybe even just regionally biased. I am sure us southerners get dinged all the time because of our unique word usage.
