People send me stuff.
In my Inbox today was a link to a Science Poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The aim of the poll was to gauge American knowledge of science and it is a parallel poll to one conducted by telephone. Given the millions spent on global warming/climate change messaging, I was shocked to see the results of this question on Carbon Dioxide. Note what I circled in red.
Similarly, I thought far more people would get this grade school science question right. Only 20% did.
The choices for both of the questions were amazingly simple, and I thought these would score far higher in the general population. One has to wonder about the 24% of college graduates that also missed the CO2 question and the 69% that missed the Nitrogen question. I also wonder what percentage answered “Carbon Dioxide” as the primary gas of Earth’s atmosphere instead of Nitrogen.
I got 100% on the test by the way.
You can take it yourself here: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/
See how your results compare with the 1,006 randomly sampled adults that took part in the Pew national telephone survey and review how you responded to each question.
For more findings from the survey, read “Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology.”
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I only got 12/13 🙁
Since it is impossible to CO2 to heat the atmosphere since is already a combustion product, I figured the correct answer must be hydrogen fusion in the sun is what scientists ‘believe’ warms the Earth.
Survey says I’m wrong.
Maybe they should ask some real scientists, or word their questions better.
how is the universe NOT infinite please? tell me about this boundary that LIMITS the universe????????
One of the reasons I follow this site is for self improvement as my scientific knowledge is truly pathetic. So go easy, guys, on those who scored less than 100% but are here reading and learning. And yes, I got 100% but admit I probably would have answered oxygen instead of nitrogen if I hadn’t read Anthony’s lead in.
According to this survey it ranks me as a 7%’er. I have been ranked as a 1%’er in another catagory. Some will know what this means.
By the way, in this simple ‘exam’ I got 13 of 13 correct.
Don’t know what I was expecting but the test was very, very simple. Did I take the right one – 13 questions? Got them all but if that puts me in the top 7% it doesn’t speak well for the education systems in UK or USA. I’m in my 60s and grammar school educated.
Drat! It was my birthday last week and I got my age wrong, the science was trivially easy.
Bill Taylor says:
October 8, 2013 at 9:41 am
The universe is big but not infinite. It has been observed to extend about 46 billion light-years in radius, & is expanding at an apparently accelerating rate, after beginning its expansion from a dense singularity some 13.7 Ba. If the emerging multiverse hypothesis is ever shown valid, then all the proposed universes together might be infinite.
is a 1%er a person like me that has scored in the TOP 1%ile in the standardized tests they have taken over their life?
I hate to be the one to ask, but what on Earth do they teach 93% of the public?
Blimey
What’s more worrying is that 2% managed to 0 or 1 correct and another 3% only 2 correct. You have to work hard to zero in a multiple choice test !
I dread to think what happens when you give these people a voting slip.
They say that elections are decided by about 5% who change their allegiance. I guess they’ve just identified the 5%
Explains why, when a country goes to the polls, they always seem to get the answer wrong.
milodon…….we need to change the words then……UNIverse means ALL that exists, IF there are other “verses” that some call multiverses then indeed they would still be part of the SINGLE UNIverse…….we need to STOP saying there is a single universe………BUT i have enough sense to know there IS a single universe and it is INFINITE……..we havent been to the edge to see that we would see MORE stuff……….the claims about a big bang are SILLY in my opinion.
“The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.”
—Albert Einstein – From “Science and God: A Dialogue”. In Forum and Century 83 (1930), 373
The climatologists, Malthusians, and quite a few others should have paid a lot more attention to Einstein apparently.
What’s notable about the survey is that the question asked was “What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?” instead of “what gas causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?”, implying this is only a belief not proven science fact.
I did the quiz and got them all right, but for some reason it said I didn’t answer this question:
I said give the drug to half. The other have would be the control.Booo hooooo. 🙁
I don’t believe this quiz indicates stupidity, it indicates ignorance. That’s a huge difference. Most people who take the quiz have normal IQ’s. They’re not stupid. And ignorance can be remedied for those willing to learn.
Those who condemn the human race for stupidity, violence, etc. always seem to carve out an exception for themselves.
Amazed at how few respondents knew that Fracking releases natural gas. Where have they been whilst U.S. gas prices plummeted over the last five years?
We could quibble about the formatting of some the questions, wrap many of them in qualifications and conditions, but for what they were trying to assess the questions as written were probably as good as they could do.
Most of those answers, I’d say 10 of ’em, SHOULD be common knowledge. Most are pretty straightforward.
N2 predominant in the atmosphere though my 7yo daughter answered ‘oxygen’ when I asked her that question the other day and my guess is that the wrong answers were probably 75% oxygen (people making what they consider logical guess in absence of knowledge) and 25% CO2 (people who only retain what they hear in the media in the last week)
I need to figure out some way to demonstrate to her what would happen if the atmosphere WERE mostly oxygen.
Bill Taylor says:
October 8, 2013 at 9:54 am
The term “universe” has a specific meaning. There is no need to change it. That it is one universe doesn’t mean that it has to be infinite or is the only such structure.
The Big Bang is not a silly claim but a well-supported scientific theory, not just an hypothesis. The relevant evidence collected to date supports the theory & no observations or data have yet shown it false.
But if you have a better, less silly explanation for the cosmic background microwave radiation at 3 K, please by all means present it here. You could revolutionize astrophysics & cosmology.
Bill Taylor says:
“I got 100% but the one question had no correct answer….the SUN makes the earth warmer NOT ANY greenhouse gas………..insulators only SLOW heat movement, without any atmosphere the earth would get VERY hot during daylight then very cold every night…”
So you should have answered correctly as I did: Hydrogen.
You deliberately gave a false answer because your pride was more important than the truth , despicable.
😉
“I got 100%, and I’ve been dead for 25 years….” That is from my grandfather, a Paleontologist.
And yes, he is rolling over in his urn.
More evidence of the extremely sad state of American public education. Wrote about three aspects, the cost/ results OCED comparison elephant in the room (contextual perspective), the class size reduction teachers union myth (truthiness and selection bias), and the no child left behind multiple state test scams ( characterization, move the goalposts) as three examples in The Arts of Truth. Does not bode well for future American competitiveness.
The only actual survey I could find is the OISM Petition, which required scientists to physically co-sign their names to this statement:
Therefore, Pew is wrong when they claim to speak for a ‘majority’ of scientists. Views opposing the OISM statement are only held by a relatively small clique of mostly grant-paid scientists.
I got 100% right and I lived 150 years ago having redefined the meaning of “Before Present” – Marcott.
Bill Yarber says: Anthony The correct answer is not “CO2″ but water vapor.
No… for PEW research only a dummy would not know that their ‘correct answer’ has to be CO2.
Like others already said , this was way too easy. Being in the top 7% for this is like points for getting your name and age correct, (a la Bob T. above)
I’m willing to guess that WUWT readers will pretty much get 100% on this thing. My message was You scored better than 93% of the public and the same as 7%.
They could have toughened it up. “The ‘hockey stick’ graph is (a) an advertisement for the National Hockey League, (b) an accurate representation of why we are all doomed to die, roasting in our own juices, (c) a fabrication as proven by Steve McIntyre and others, or (d) huh?