I took this fun science literacy quiz, and got 47 out of 50 questions correct.
The ones I missed were all in biology and life sciences, my weakest subject. Since so many of the angroids label climate skeptics as “scientifically illiterate”, and because climate change is specifically mentioned, I thought it would be fun to share and to have readers post their scores. Many of the questions are simple, like the first one:
Then there’s some tougher ones, like about Planck’s constant and some that require some simple physics math, F=ma and stuff like that. There’s a bit of irony in whose website the poll is on.
The Christian Science Monitor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1209/Are-you-scientifically-literate-Take-our-quiz/
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single question about climate change, even though they mention it. If you feel like taking it, don’t succumb to the temptation to look up everything on the Internet…there’s no sport in perfect scores.
Smokey says:
April 8, 2012 at 1:20 pm
“Arn Riewe,
Yes, I note that the usual suspects haven’t posted their scores.”
Smokey and Arn,
Many of them have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted to be honest about basic science issues. Without an independent ‘report card’, I don’t think I trust them to be honest about anything, even as trivial as this little quiz!
MtK
Got me on Eris and the pea plant (and I should have known the pea plant). Fun quiz but kinda stupid.
45 – I was going for speed
4 silly mistakes, and one I never knew.
29/50……argh !!! Fun Quiz though, cheers.
Heggs.
The quiz froze at question 43. I got 38/43, partly because I was rushing and didn’t think carefully about a couple of questions.
But they were pretty simple stuff. I had learned most of that at school before I was 16. For some of them (e.g. eukaryote) you didn’t even need to know any science. All you had to do was translate the Greek.
I got somewhere in the low 70% (can’t remember exactly). My daughter took it and got 73%. I’m a chemist (at least I got all the chemistry questions right), and my daughter majored in geography. I graduated from college in 1969, and I have still have no idea what a “eukaryote” is — I really don’t think they covered that. And Brontosaurus meaning “Thunder Lizard” — Bronto means thunder?? I enjoyed taking the test, but was impatient that it had a separate screen for giving the correct answer, before going to the next question.
You answered 50 of 50 questions correctly for a total score of 100%. ^_^
I read WUWT daily, which explains it. I didn’t know what they’d named the body past Pluto, but I knew all but one of the choices were in use for the names of moons or asteroids.
You answered 50 of 50 questions correctly for a total score of 100%. ^_^
I read WUWT daily, which is like fuel for the brain.
I didn’t know what they’d named the body past Pluto, but I recognized all but one choice as names of Pluto’s moons and a Kupier belt asteroid.
43 out of 50. I’ve got the boss doing it now.
46/50 … and I was determined to beat Anthony too .. so that’s a primary mission FAILURE!
Meiosis-meitosis: Never could remember which was which. Also went for blastocyst instead of zygote. Haven’t rubbed up against the coefficient of friction since 1973 – so crashed and burned there. Clueless about ‘Nimbus’, as well, which I imagine Anthony might possibly have guessed correctly(?!).
All good fun though!
And deepest gratitude and heartfelt best wishes to you Mr Watts for your irreplaceable website and your courageous and intellectually-rigorous stand against junk science. You’re the last American hero in my book and your name will be celebrated long after Global Warming is consigned to the garbage disposal of history.
I got 6 wrong out of the first 42, then the rest of the quiz froze up or something.
46 out of 50, BSC in Applied Science and my love of mythology helped.
A key requisite for scientists wishing to be famous and successful, is learning how to disguise your own ignorance. [Guess that’s why I only got 44 ]
Failing that, criticize the question or the questioner. [Hey, it works in climate-change-ology]
47/50 for me. It would be interesting to compare average scores for WUWT readers versus readers of some other blogs.
39/50 🙁
I shoulda done better, but never use physical units of measurement, and. . .
Enough excuses!
Greek clues helped, I must admit.
/Mr Lynn
Ric Werme says:
April 8, 2012 at 11:38 am
Prokaryotes have circular chromosomes, not linear ones. That means no telomeres.
As an aside, I’ve seen people trained in physics or another “hard science”, decide to deal with some “simple” questions in biology. Typically, they discover the hard way biology isn’t a particularly “soft” science.
Alas, I didn’t know, what Greek letter designates the coefficient of friction! Guess I’m scientifically illiterate, after all. But so are the authors of this quiz. Because physical units named after scientists (Ampere, Joule, Watt, etc.) must be capitalized. Because quark is not an elementary particle. Because the size and the mass of Eris are unknown (the hypothesis that it is larger than Pluto is no more than a speculation). And, as far as I know, Hubble, the discoverer of the red shift, did not postulate the expansion of the Universe. A Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, did that on Vatican orders.
Darn. g2-e1dac56eda01bae75bf1f4ea5d7fa0d6 was me. I must have my gravitar settings screwed up. That’s the second time I’ve come up as a serial number.
I’d like to see a test of scientific knowledge that doesn’t include the particular terms and history that an advanced alien species would not have a clue about.
Darn it, Word Press once again said my name was g2-e1dac56eda01bae75bf1f4ea5d7fa0d6.
Had to go edit my profile.
40 out of 50. I was tempted to look some of them up, but avoided the temptation. Not a bad score, since I was playing Warcraft at the same time I did the quiz. hehe
82% here but not bad if we consider I’m just a denier believing the Earth is flat…
44 out of 50. As an Australian I cheated on the US culturally specific question about the US postal service and the Brontosaurus. Only seems fair to put foreigners on a level playing field?
48, should have had 49 but a sloppy arithmetic mistake on f=ma. Did not know the new body beyond Pluto.
Hoser says:
April 8, 2012 at 7:16 pm
When I was interested in ecology, probably around the first Earth Day, I bought an ecology textbook. All differential equations. Very little of the foxes eating the rabbits (except as a diff eq model).
One odd thing about my schooling – my English classes morphed from memorizing vocaulary and spellings to analyzing essays and novels. Meanwhile, biology morphed from observing plants and animals to memorizing terms like meiosis and mitosis (which I remembered) to terms like prophase through telophase (which I didn’t) to all the many steps to go from glucose to ATP. (I remember the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, but can’t tell what’s inside them.) See http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Sigma-Aldrich/General_Information/metabolicpathways_updated_02_07.Par.0001.File.tmp/metabolic_pathways_poster.pdf
While that’s really biochemistry, how many kinds of RNAs are there (e.g transfer RNA, messenger RNA, a few more named since I was in high school, etc) or how many types of white blood cells are there?
Edward Bancroft says:
April 8, 2012 at 9:13 am
Yeah, but I’ve been thinking of how the test should be structured and concentrate in things that that show understanding, not just definitions, or things that can be deduced from recalling some facts. The more complex questions tend not to fit into multiple choice
answers readily.
For example “The Hohmann transfer orbit optimizes what aspect of moving around in space?” With answers like “minimal fuel use,” “time of flight”, “gravitational assist.”
A lot of questions defy multiple choice answers. For example, “argon constitutes 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Why hasn’t it settled at ground level and suffocated us all?” One good thing about a question like that is it takes multiple bits of knowledge to answer the question well.
John Warner says:
April 8, 2012 at 8:23 pm
44 out of 50. As an Australian I cheated on the US culturally specific question about the US postal service and the Brontosaurus. Only seems fair to put foreigners on a level playing field?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sorry mate, can’t give you a pass on that. I’m a Kiwi and I knew it. Not about the stamp but that brontosaurus is a bogus name.