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.
A short story for the people above who call this a memory test instead of a science test. When I was in High School I took a field-trip to a cyclotron. The physicist who was giving the tour was giving us some info. on a chalk board and it became evident that he couldn’t remember the numerical value for the speed of light! Also, remember that Einstein did not remember his own phone number because he said “why memorize something you can look up in a book.”
48/50
Missed Mitosis and Horsepower.
The latter of which I am quite annoyed with myself about. As I was clicking submit for BTUs I had a sudden thought along the lines of “What the hell does heating water have to do with foot-pounds…..” , but it was too late.
Oh well, I’m sure a lot of people had answers they were mad at themselves for immediately after the fact =P Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
@Alexander Feht,
For friction I always remembered “Friction is Fun!”
I used this to remember the formula: f = μn
Or the force of friction(f) is equal to the coefficient of friction(μ) times the normal force(n).
Remembering of course to factor in the fact that both f and n are vectors.
34 but I am just a lawyer. Aced the chemistry though since my dad was a PhD in biochemistry. Didn’t do too badly on the biology.
Where were the medical questions? Since I was a personal injury lawyer for 30 plus years, I think not having any medical questions (not even any basic anatomy) cost me.
Hey, I got 33 out of 50 right. Not bad for a lawyer who hadn’t studied much science since senior year physics in high school. All the rest of you guys are too smart for me. Lol!
37… I have a degree is micro/phytopath so I aced the bio + chem… I never liked physics though
*in…
Got the F = ma though 🙂
37/50 OK but should have done better, but I failed physics at Uni and left (1968)
37
But I don’t agree that anecdotal knowledge of moons in the solar system makes you “scientifically literate” – it just makes you literate…
Just got my 12 year old son Marcus to have a go,
Once we got over the “I dont know” stock answer and with a help to think outside the box and pattern forming he scored a creditable 19 including 4 guesses from the 2 remaining choices.
Now if they didnt have 8 weeks holiday in the summer he may learn even more !!!
41 / 50.
46.
Missed Hubble, mu, natural log, and nimbus (sorry Anthony).
Not bad for a Monday morning, I guess.
49/50 not bad for a failed physics major turned mathematician. I missed the Nimbus cloud question which I suppose was easy for all real climate watchers.
I would like to challenge some college age relatives to take the test but from here it was painfully slow and I had to restart it 4 times because it locked up. So probably a bad idea.
35/50
Where’s my prize? All must have prizes!
41 out of 50, thought I would do worse, but I also thought I would do better on the mathematics questions.
Quiz results: 46 Correct, 4 Wrong
You answered 46 of 50 questions correctly for a total score of 92%.
Total test took a few minutes over an hour to complete (went to kitchen to pour a cup of coffee at one point, moved the Green-cheeked Conure (bird) between cages, all the while watching NBC’s “Today” program with the beautiful Natalie Morales, but I digress) … and that was using Google in an open-book test-taking format (which I’m sure a number of ppl also did) … not all Google-referenced items (relied upon for ‘answers’ on more obscure subjects for an engineer for instance) would appear to be correct (maybe in a quick, hurried read at least) …
It would be tough to believe that most reported scores of over 40 (correct) did not rely on web searches or text-book references (the last time i saw the term ‘zygote’ must have been during sex ed or some biology class a generation and more ago and who remembers the four stages of a eukaryotic cell’s division in/during mitosis?).
Quite a test; thanks for posting Anthony.
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47 – I missed Nimbus, thunderlizard, and… the extra-Pluto object (maybe that one was published in one of the pop-science rags that I don’t ever even look through anymore since they began their pathological obsession with the evil CO2). And I admit I guessed on a few, but they weren’t totally uneducated guesses. Narrowing a choice down to one of two is better than randomly choosing one of four.
Sometimes we over-analyze these things… for these types of quizzes we all should know that the desired answer is the popular answer, not always the right answer, and a few were worded with slightly less than crystal clarity.
I always liked these kinds of quizzes… of course, I always like anything that makes me look smart.
Got about 15 questions into it then had to sign off. Starting over again later, I found the first 15 questions curiously easy. I managed to finish, but I was severely distracted by pop-ups. A helmeted traffic cop with sunglasses kept checking my speed with a radar gun, sometimes pointing right at me. Unnerving when you’re trying to remember the number of bloody moons of bloody Neptune. : – !
Where do these ads come from? Did I track that one in, or did one of the blogging gods place it there?
Finally had the chance to take this, without referencing anything,
scored 39/50.
Do have to say I am pretty happy, I missed all 5 I had to guess at, but shrug, I think anyone who scored in this neighborhood or higher with any kind of science background is doing good. I am in computers, so the only reason I have science background at all is from high school and reading blogs such as this one lol…so go figure. Never took any phyiscs, chemistry or anything like that in college so all I had was math and biology in college, which was kind of how I did manage to get the zygote question correct myself. I have to really read into phyics etc which I do depending on jobs and what not all the time, so I am constantly keeping up to date on various topics, but for general run of the mill physics, forget it lol!
Which just goes to show we all have those different questions we get wrong or right.
Thanks for the diversion, It was needed.
@Paul Westhaver
‘Fred Hoyle was furious with Gamov and LeMaitre for suggesting that the universe was not static and never accepted the expanding universe theory and he died in 2001… he was so completely and spectacularly wrong about the static universe model.’ Wrong there – the Steady State model was always an expanding universe in agreement with Hubble.
‘Too bad since got the atomic synthesis theory correct for atoms larger than iron.’ Wrong again, I’m afraid. Hoyle famously predicted the mechanism for the nucleosynthesis of Carbon.
‘Hoyle was a simple case of a recalcitrant, intelligent, atheist, consumed with his own arrogance. His snotty disposition won him many enemies.’ Where I come from, we have a saying: Tha can allus tell a Yorkshireman, but tha can’t tell him much. Hoyle never took anything on authority, and that is a good thing. Wherever he saw a cosy scientific consensus he set out to pick (usually mathematical) holes in it. Some would say that is how science works. He was, for example, a chapter author in ESEF’s ‘The Global Warming Debate’.
‘I’m sure he thought himself flawless.’ I don’t know how you can be sure, but in any case I’m not a great believer in thoughtcrime nor, for that matter, any kind of ad hominem argument in science.
‘As for Friedman…. I think you are alone in asserting that he thought up the big bang. I’d like to see that in writing.’ Fighting talk, no less. No, I didn’t make it up. This is from ‘Cosmic Life Force’ (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1988, page 116): ‘…the “Big Bang” model of the Universe which was first suggested in 1922 by the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman.’ If that source is too obscure for you, you could always try Wikipedia: ‘When Lemaître approached Einstein at the 1927 Solvay Conference, the latter pointed out that Alexander Friedmann had proposed a similar solution to Einstein’s equations in 1922, implying that the radius of the universe increased over time.’
Personally, I think the Big Bang model in its current form is too dependent on additional hypotheses – inflation, dark matter, dark energy… Hoyle certainly did not reject expansion at any point in his career, and in the early 1990’s he, with Burbidge and Nalikar, published the Quasi-Steady State Cosmology, which assumed that our observable universe was largely a ‘minibang’ embedded in an infinite universe. See for example
http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jaa/18/353-362.pdf
for the several advantages of this theory over the Standard Big Bang.
Or just accept that the Standard Model is Holy Writ…
46 out of 50
No, I’m not a scientist, I just pay attention.
Many of you have dully noted the shortcomings of this quiz as a measure of any real scientific ability. In fact it reads like the science cards in Trivial Pursuit.
But the point to take away from this is that if the warmist MSM believes their test is a valid measure of scientific literacy, then our collective performance here knocks the “ignorant skeptic” meme right into a cocked hat.
38/50 is something I probably shouldn’t be too ashamed of, in today’s America, but I probably shouldn’t have missed the cloud question beings this is a site full of amateur weather nerds, of which I consider myself.
Cumulonimbus clouds are vertical, which I answered, but they also precipitate, which is the correct answer.
Just flew in from a birding and butterflying trip to south Texas- and now this! Got 45 right with a couple of lucky guesses. Actually, there were several clues, linquistic and otherwise for some of the questions, which helped. My undergraduate and graduate biology helped. My ham radio hobby of 55 years helped me with 3 or 4 questions. My math skills hurt me enanomously. Very impressive group of WUWTers here! Bet the Skeptical Science blog alarmists would do goreable in this test.
45 here.
But some of you guys should quit apologizing for guessing. Here in California we educators spend a great deal of time and effort teaching the kids how to make good guesses on tests….
By the way we also teach ‘scalene’ and ‘metamorphic’ in 3rd and 4th grade.
: > )