Free will?

Free will or synaptic wiring? You be the judge.

Follow the instructions! NO PEEKING AHEAD!

Do the following exercise, guaranteed to raise an eyebrow. There's no
trick or surprise. Just follow these instructions and answer the
questions one at a time as quickly as you can! Again, as quickly as you
can - but don't advance until you've done each tof them. Now, scroll down
(but not too fast, you might miss something).

Think of a number from 1 to 10.

To see the whole problem, read this.

So, for the first few steps of the problem you can look at the arithmetic and see that no matter what number is initially chosen, the result will always be the digit 4, thus the initial letter for the last part of the problem will always be the 4^th letter, D.

Now, lets look at countries whose name begins with the letter D. The Library of Congress' MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) Project maintains an extensive list of country codes, much more comprehensive than the ISO list for Domain Name Country Codes (the .us, for example, at the end of a web address) or the telephone country codes. From an examination of that list these are the extent of such country names, in two lists:

Denmark
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic

The above lists countries without other, more common names. The following list includes country (or region) names with their more common name (or the name of the country that annexed the region listed).

Dahomey (Benin)
Daitojima (Ryukyu Islands, Southern Japan)
Daman (India)
Danger Atoll (Cook Islands)
Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia)
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)
Democratic People's Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam)
Democrate Republic of the Congo (Congo)
D'Entrecasteaux Islands (Papua New GUinea)
Desroches, Ile (Seychelles)
Diego Garcia Island (British Indian Ocean Territory)
Diu (India)
Dodecanese (Greece)
Dubai (United Arab Emirates)
Dubayy (United Arab Emirates)
Ducie Atoll (Pitcairn Island)
Dutch Guiana (Surinam)

As you can see, there are very few countries with such names, and there is little doubt that Denmark would be the most popular choice. This would vary depending upon the audience, so we are really talking about relative frequency rather than absolute frequency.

Now, if you'd like to check out word frequency lists, take a look at

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-583.html

for a summary of discussion on English word frequency lists, along with

http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html

Now, with respect to animal names beginning with the letter K, here is a list of words that begin with K, along with various frequency counts.

K-words generated from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database.

Looking over this list, I see the following animal names (and I don't doubt that I might have missed some):

Kangaroo (and variants)
Kelpie
Kestrel (and plural)
Killifish
Kine
Kingfisher
Kiwi
Koala
Kookaburra

(interesting that four of these are Australian animals!)

Of these, Kangaroo has by far the largest frequency listing (70 in the Thorndike-Lorge written list, with Kingfisher and Kine next at 10).

Now, about those oranges...I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to check out fruit names that begin with "O" but I can tell you that as I scan the O-words, that "orange" with a Thorndike-Lorge frequency of 3510 is far more common than "olive" with a Thordike-Lorge frequency count of 1560.

So of the claim that 98% of the animal responses are Kangaroo, I'd guess that 98% of the countries chosen were Denmark, leading to a search for animal names that begin with K. The real question is who comes up with these things!?