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Don't know much about... geography?

Miss South Carolina Teen USA, Lauren Caitlin Upton, has become an internet sensation after giving a rather mangled response to a pageant question.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told South Carolina’s The State newspaper. “I wasn’t expecting [the question]. I lost my train of thought.”

The beauty contestant’s video on YouTube has received more than 2 million hits thanks to her amazingly off-the-mark answer at the pageant, when she was queried about why Americans are so bad at geography.

She was asked why one-fifth of Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” she began.

During the painful response, she also tossed in out-of-the-blue references to “the Iraq” and “Asian countries” and their need for the support of the American educational system in identifying the United States on the map.

The show’s host, Mario Lopez (of Saved by the Bell fame) said: “It was a very intense moment. It’s live TV. You don’t know what the question is until you get up there. And I believe that she misunderstood it. She went down the wrong road and couldn’t figure out how to get back to the right one,” he says. “I felt really badly for her.”

Despite the on-camera gaffe, Upton finished as third runner-up. You can see her informed answer here.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .