How well does Watson fit under our heading of inferential, knowledge-based QA? Does it actually understand the questions and the answers it produces? Despite its impressive performance against Jeopardy! champions, Watson reasons, and understands English in only very restricted senses. The program exploits the fact that the target of a Jeopardy! question is usually a named entity, such as Jimmy Carter, Islamabad, or Black Hole of Calcutta, though other types of phrases are occasionally targeted. Watson is likely to find multiple sentences that mention a particular entity of the desired type, and whose syntactic and semantic features are close to the features of the question, thereby making the named entity a plausible answer without real understanding of the question. For example, a “recent history” question asking for the president under whom the US gave full recognition to Communist China (Ferrucci 2012) might well zero in on such sentences as