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My score: 47/50.
Questions I got wrong
What word, which derives from a Greek term meaning "unequal" or "bent," describes a triangle whose three sides are of unequal length?
Over half of the world's supply of what element, which gets its name from the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, is used in catalytic converters?
In meteorology, what does the suffix -nimbus added to the name of a cloud indicate?
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Newbury Park, CA
I got 31 right. I feel dumb, but I know the average american get 10.
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Reston, VA
40/50 - mostly the planets threw me for a loop. Also, missed the triangle and cloud questions, the brontosaurus (thunder), and the fluorine as the lightest halogen question.
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burritos says
I wouldn't put it past this illiterate country. 18% of Americans think that the sun revolves around the Earth.
YesYNot says
Yeah, a while back it was found that the scientist who discovered the brontosaurus had previously discovered it and called it apatosaurus. He didn't realize that the bones where from the same animal. Personally, I like brontosaurus because it means "Thunder Lizzard" which is an apt name as the creature's footsteps would pound like thunder. But the convention is that the first name is the one that should stick. Given that everyone knows brontosaurus, they should have made an exception.
Here's a nice page that explains this.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/371/is-it-true-the-brontosaurus-never-really-existed
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Reston, VA
I guess a monkey would get 12.5 + - right, considering the multiple choice nature of it.
But that doesn't mean that the average American couldn't do worse, what with misinformation bias and all :). Step right up Ruki.
Brontosaurus is a cool name. I'll definitely remember it, and will probably get the answer wrong when they change it to apatosaurus :o.
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Forty-four. With several WAGS. But really, James Joyce? Well I used the date to reason my way out of that one. Curiously, there were several questions that went that route (perhaps intentionally)? I got cocky in the 40's and went with my gut on one which I immediately regretted. How long does it take to communicate with the Mars rover. Crap. That's embarrassing. I still haven't let go of Pluto and refuse to acknowledge the existence of that supposed new planet -- which I just learned is named Eris. I desperately tried to channel Tom Lehrer on a couple of those questions. The noble gases did me in -- for some reason I tried to make fluorine one of them despite knowing someone who makes a living from doing fluorine chemistry. Nimbus felled me as well. Oh, and I got the Hubble one right thanks to ThunderLips posting that atheist tent revival video. All right dan, what did you answer for the triangle one?
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Davis, CA
Only 40 out of 50.
But, I was blowing through it Jeopardy style. Read the question and immediately buzz the first answer that came to me, rather than sit and analyze.
My MOMENT OF SHAME was picking "copper" as the oxidizing element making Mars red.
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Boca Raton, FL
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EBGuy says
I used process of elimination on that one. Never read Joyce.
EBGuy says
Depends on the relative positions of Earth and Mars. Earth is at 1 AU or 8 light-minutes from the sun. Mars is at 1.5 AU or 12 light-minutes. So the time for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars varies from 4 minutes (12 - 8) to 20 minutes (12 + 8).
EBGuy says
I don't mind calling Pluto a planet if we also call anything massive enough to be round a planet. So there are at least a dozen planets in our solar system. I just want consistency.
Calling Pluto a dwarf planet but saying it's not a planet makes no sense. How is a dwarf planet not a planet? The astronomical society should have used the term planetoid, as that term doesn't imply something is a planet.
EBGuy says
That one I had to reason out. I knew radon was a radioactive gas, as you hear about needing to check for radon when buying a house. Since radioactivity is caused by nuclear instability due to having lots of protons, only the heavier elements are radioactive.
I also knew that none of the other gases were radioactive, so they had to be lighter. I just didn't know whether or not radon was a noble gas, i.e., has its entire outer shell of electrons filled. But I guessed that it probably was because I've never heard of a substance in which radon was one of the atoms in the molecule.
EBGuy says
It was a tossup between oblong and scalene. I went with oblong.
Etymology is not one of my areas of expertise, which explains why all the questions I got wrong were vocabulary ones.
Vicente says
If it were copper, Mars would be green like the Statue of Liberty. And that would be a cool sight.
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"4. In 1989, the US postal service drew criticism from paleontologists for releasing a stamp with what obsolete genus name, which translates from Greek as "Thunder Lizard"?"
This is s trivia question...
"2. The Austrian monk Gregor Mendel's observations of what organism formed the basis for the science of genetics?"
And another trivia question...
Oxygen is the most abundant element on Earth while Nitrogen is the most abundant gas? Yeah that makes sense...
Mars also does not have a Moon, contrary to what a few egg heads in Copenhagen took it upon them selves to hijack common knowledge, Pluto is Planet. If you're going to redefine "Planets" then it is stupid to call every object in the solar system that does not have an iron core and an atmosphere a planet.
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This is more of a test of random facts, and does not test scientific literacy at all. It was fun though. 48 out of 50.
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Reston, VA
CaptainShuddup says
Sarcasm? Many elements in the ground are in an oxidized state. For example, iron ore, aluminum ore, calcium carbonate, phosphate rock have lots of oxygen in them. Most metals do. I think that the oxygen question was the most abundant element in the earth's crust.
It tested mostly high school or intro level physics & chemistry with some planetary science, etymology, and some stuff on the scientific creation of the universe and earth.
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YesYNot says
Yes, that question dealt with elements in the Earth's crust, not in the atmosphere.
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San Jose, CA
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Dan8267 says
That's not true, almost all elements have radioactive isotopes. On the low end of the periodic table tridium (H3)and Carbon 14 come to mind.
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New renter says
Yes, two many neutrons can also be unstable, which is why hydrogen can only support three neutrons and that is radioactive. But let me clarify.
If an element, rather than an isotope, is radioactive, then its due to a large number of protons. On the low end of the periodic table, only a few rare isotopes are radioactive whereas the common isotopes are not. Furthermore, the radiation from those isotopes is so low it's not dangerous, unlike radon.
Since all radon is radioactive and dangerous, it is valid to conclude that radon is high up on the periodic table. In fact it has 86 protons.
Now, one could argue that all elements are radioactive, but some have half lives that are many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe. Even protons decay, so a simple hydrogen atom, one proton / one electron, will eventually decay and omit radiation, but that will take a long time, on the order of 10^32 years.
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Dan8267 says
Well it's an interesting point I had never considered. All that oxygen tied up in the crust. Makes me wonder if terraforming would be possible if you could find some trick to liberate enough oxygen from Mars surface without other effects. I suspect I'm not alone in being pretty familiar with the air I breathe, but not so much the dirt under my feet.
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41/50. I should have taken Geology and Organic Chemistry, if only to get those questions right, but chose economics instead. Ironically, actually studying economics seems to have been self-defeating because I'm paying rent while the really smart folks bankrupted the institutions with which they had been entrusted, then got government bailout bonuses, which they transform into nice homes for themselves at everyone else's expense. When you're paying with bailout $, the house being overpriced merely adds to the fun.
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Davis, CA
curious2 says
Not all of us are constitutionally suited to lying, swindling, and smoothly glad-handing meanwhile plotting how to skim off the Widows & Orphans fund.
I could suppress my bile and pretend for maybe a year. Then I'd go postal.
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San Leandro, CA
I got 12 right. Shudup ! Many questions might as well have been writin in swahili.
Studied meteorology, but forgot that nimbus meaning. Speakin of clouds. Any Meteorologists out there that might splain these photos I took of these accordion like cumulonimbus last friday just north of the San Francisco bay ? Never seen anything like it. As if there was some sort of atmospheric percussion forming the bellows.
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Davis, CA
TMAC54 says
Lenticular cloud.
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San Leandro, CA
Vicente says
Lenticular yes, for the ones on the right. But why are they stacked like flapjacks ?
and the dark grey on the left, also stacked show symmetry I have never seen. You ? Those two formations were within ten miles of each other. I can only assume there was some series of equal atmospheric pressure changes within a short period of time. Might they have been caused by man or ????
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This test does not measure scientific knowledge.
A scientist is someone that has a WORKING understanding of the laws of nature. By WORKING understanding, I mean a capability to predict (calculate) the outcome (or the probabilities of outcomes) of a given experiment, based on fundamental principles, at least in some field of science.
Knowing names of moons of Saturn or whatever does not make anyone a scientist.
To be fair, the test is advertised as a test of "scientific literacy". That does somewhat fit what the test is, which is 50% latin word recognition and 50% simple trivia that does not have any deep scientific value.
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Nice afternoon diversion, but it's a pretty lousy quiz. To many hints which give you the answer just because you can guess the greek/latin/literary clue. And who cares what greek letter is used to represent a coefficient for friction? That's not scientific knowledge, that's just useless trivia.
And where are the questions that are actually relevant to modern humans, like understanding statistical significance, causation vs. correlation, ionizing vs. non-ionizing radiation, why incandescent lightbulbs are so inefficient, where oil came from, the Haber process, why C02 is a greenhouse gas and what that means, what a trans-fat is, or what a ground wire is? Seriously, understanding the science of any of those is far more relevant than the name of the celestial body discovered beyond Pluto.
44/50
44/50