Interesting Science Quiz [Archive] - Straight Dope Message Board

RadicalPi

01-11-2012, 09:10 PM

I got all of them, but I did have to guess on three of them:

1. The tied-for-last in terms of surface gravity one.
2. The Greek letter used for the coefficient of friction one.
3. The Athena one.

That’s better luck than I usually have. Anyway, some of the questions, though, I don’t think address scientific literacy all that well. The origin of the word “quark” seems to be of no importance, really. And the questions about e and uneven triangles are really more about math. Also, I think knowing who discovered what and what ideas are named after who is not particularly important for scientific literacy. Like the question on redshift should have been more on what redshift is exactly and what that means about the universe and not on whose name is attached to the idea.

Giles

01-11-2012, 09:11 PM

47/50 -- I found knowing a bit of Latin and Greek was a help.

WhyNot

01-11-2012, 09:11 PM

47/50. Rather better than I expected, to be honest.

Jenaroph

01-11-2012, 09:14 PM

44/50. And there was one I knew, just clicked the wrong answer, 14 trillion instead of 14 billion.

Snarky_Kong

01-11-2012, 09:17 PM

Why the fuck do you have to click twice for each question? Answer once, compile at the end!

41/50

Dag Otto

01-11-2012, 09:18 PM

36. The chemistry* and physics were cake, but the biology questions killed me.My confidence on those was 25%.

The unit questions were the easy ones.

*except the chemistry questions that I could have easily answered if I had a periodic table in front of me. I missed most of those. I'm not sure if that would be cheating or not. If you were really science illiterate then having a periodic table in front of you wouldn't help, would it?

Lord Il Palazzo

01-11-2012, 09:20 PM

47/50 -- I found knowing a bit of Latin and Greek was a help.My thoughts (and score) exactly. I picked up a couple that would otherwise have been 1/2 or 1/3 guesses based on Greek and Latin roots in the answers (the "Good Kernal" question comes to mind.)

Dag Otto

01-11-2012, 09:22 PM

BTW OP, did you find that quiz the same way I did, through the Google doodle?

california jobcase

01-11-2012, 09:26 PM

48/50. Missed one math constant question and one physics symbol question, but I have never taken a physics class or math higher than algebra in college.

I am a retired HS science teacher, but I never taught physics.

That was one slow-moving quiz.

RadicalPi

01-11-2012, 09:29 PM

44/50. A couple of them surprised me.

Why is the gravity on Mars so low?

The question talks about gravity at the surface of the planet. While Mars is twice as massive than Mercury, its surface is farther away from its center than Mercury's surface is because Mars is also physically larger than Mercury. So, it coincidentally turns out that everything is in such a proportion that things pretty much cancel out.

RadicalPi

01-11-2012, 09:43 PM

The question talks about gravity at the surface of the planet. While Mars is twice as massive than Mercury, its surface is farther away from its center than Mercury's surface is because Mars is also physically larger than Mercury. So, it coincidentally turns out that everything is in such a proportion that things pretty much cancel out.

To show the calculations, given that the mass of Mars is 0.107 times that of the Earth and that its radius is 0.532 times that of Earth, and that the mass of Mercury is 0.0553 that of Earth, while its radius is 0.383 that of earth, the surface gravity of these two planets proportionate to that of the Earth is given by the equation g = m/r2. Plugging and chugging for Mars gives g = 0.107/(0.532)2 = 0.378. And for Mercury, the equation gives g = 0.0553/(0.383)2 = 0.377.

Chessic Sense

01-11-2012, 09:59 PM

45. I am apparently bad at guessing. I couldn't remember if it was Ceres or Eris that was huge, and I didn't know the surface gravity question, as I'm unfamiliar with densities and I think I misread the question anyway. I also missed the water-moon one. I felt like the kid in Slumdog Millionaire, with a story for how I knew each one.

ETA: I don't think it was a bad test. It's about scientific literacy, so if you're not well-read enough to know that the smallest units are named after Max Planck, then you should miss that one. And if I tell you that my 1920s death ray looks like a scalene triangle, and you give me a blank stare, you should miss that one, too.

ENugent

01-11-2012, 10:12 PM

45/50. That site is maddeningly slow..

Tangent

01-11-2012, 10:15 PM

50/50 - I'm a science teacher so most of the questions are stuff I deal with in class frequently.

rowrrbazzle

01-11-2012, 10:22 PM

48/50

1. Said "Nyx" was larger than Pluto.
2. Said Watt named his unit BTU.

RoeCocoa

01-11-2012, 10:41 PM

40/50. Would have been higher, but I decided not to go back and change the ones I got wrong.

Ponch8

01-11-2012, 10:41 PM

46/50. I should have gotten 47 but I absent-mindedly clicked helium instead of hydrogen for the single proton question. (I knew it was hydrogen, but for some reason helium was the first word that popped into my head.)

Cunctator

01-11-2012, 10:42 PM

I got 46/50. But the questions often gave additional information that made it easy to guess the correct answer.

And yes, it's slow.

gotpasswords

01-11-2012, 10:53 PM

39, but if I'd gone with my first thought on six or seven questions, I'd have come out with a 45 or so. Not bad for someone who hasn't thought about pea plant genetics since high school. And yes, having a periodic table at hand would definitely help with some of the questions. (Who actually needs to memorize elements by their numbers in real life?)

Enola Straight

01-11-2012, 11:14 PM

43/50

Isamu

01-11-2012, 11:42 PM

I suck at astronomy questions. Seriously had no idea how long light takes to travel from the sun. :p
All the other questions were pretty easy though.

Nametag

01-11-2012, 11:50 PM

48/50Got "Mars" and "Nimbus" wrong

GameHat

01-12-2012, 12:07 AM

43/50

I should have done better, being a "Chemical Engineer", or whatever my diploma says.

A lot of those questions though - even the chemical ones - I had to think back to college. Which was like eight years ago. Yeah, you don't use a whole lot of University learning when practicing as an actual engineer.

Fun quiz though. The questions I missed sent me straight to wikipedia to find out the truth.

Dag Otto

01-12-2012, 12:40 AM

Yeah, you don't use a whole lot of University learning when practicing as an actual engineer.

It's surprising how you forget the little things. Out of college about 5 years and I have to calculate the area of a circle. Easy, Pi*r**2.

Then doubt sets in as I realize it's been a while since I actually used that formula.

Or is it 2*Pi*r**2?

Or (Pi*r**2)/2?

Textbooks usually have formulas printed inside the covers. Other books you have in the office? Not so much.

Now, I know it has r**2, since I need an answer in square units. But the rest? I had to resort to integration to determine the answer.

I felt stupid for not knowing, yet smart for being able to derive it.

Breccia

01-12-2012, 02:45 AM

if you've been in university fresh bio, chem, physics you'll get 9 of 10.
the "newton" ish thing, well, got 2 degrees in engr here, so it's predictable, otherwise, fu.
seems off base. not looking for learning but memorization. that's all ok too. just sayin.

Zebra

01-12-2012, 03:23 AM

32/50 OK many of them I had narrowed it down to two and guessed wrong but the right reply was my other choice.

And some were WAGs that I lucked out on and got right.

I know next to nothing about the table of elements but I got the 'brimstone' correct from watching Star Trek.

Jackknifed Juggernaut

01-12-2012, 06:21 AM

freckafree

01-12-2012, 06:24 AM

38/50

I sucked on most of the physics questions and kicked ass on the chemistry, since I just finished reading The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Quartz

01-12-2012, 06:44 AM

45 / 50. Got Watt and Joule mixed up, and hadn't a clue on 4 others so guessed wrong. All the others I knew.

FairyChatMom

01-12-2012, 07:17 AM

37 - biology and reading too fast did me in. Sheesh, it's not like it's a timed test. I have to say, I did impress myself with how much chemistry I remembered, as I hated that almost as much as I hated biology.

Alka Seltzer

01-12-2012, 07:33 AM

48/50

Not a bad test, but much of it was a test of scientific trivia rather than literacy (Mendel's pea plants for example). Despite my high score, I'm only scientifically literate in that I have a fair understanding of principals. My actual ability to carry out scientific experiments or calculations is very limited.

Smeghead

01-12-2012, 07:34 AM

I got the first four right then got fed up with the irritating website design and quit.

enipla

01-12-2012, 08:00 AM

41. Kicking myself on some of them. Also, that's the most annoying website ever.No kidding. I gave up after about 10 questions. It's way too slow.

Small Clanger

01-12-2012, 08:48 AM

God grief that took ages, you have to load the (slow CPU sucking) page twice for each question? Argh!

45/50

Who the heck knows what 'nimbus' means?

bouv

01-12-2012, 08:54 AM

41. Kicking myself on some of them. Also, that's the most annoying website ever.

Seriously! having to click twice for every answer...just do them all at the end, or give the answer from the last one on the same page as the question for the next!

That, letting my script-blocker "un-block" enough scripts to let me use the damn thing...seriously, there must have been two dozen different website all trying to run a script on that page!

I got 47/50. The three I missed were:

Heaviest noble gas
The planet past Pluto (guessed Ceres.)
And what Nimbus meant.

Alka Seltzer

01-12-2012, 08:55 AM

Yes, the website is pretty awful. I found loading it in Chrome made it more bearable.

Mahaloth

01-12-2012, 09:10 AM

35/50

I consider myself fairly smart, but I am not a science expert by a lot. I did know many of the answers I missed once the correct answer was revealed. A lot of 50/50 misses and some lazy/quick answering.

Satchmo

01-12-2012, 10:24 AM

It's surprising how you forget the little things. Out of college about 5 years and I have to calculate the area of a circle. Easy, Pi*r**2.

Then doubt sets in as I realize it's been a while since I actually used that formula.

Or is it 2*Pi*r**2?

Or (Pi*r**2)/2?

Textbooks usually have formulas printed inside the covers. Other books you have in the office? Not so much.

Now, I know it has r**2, since I need an answer in square units. But the rest? I had to resort to integration to determine the answer.

I felt stupid for not knowing, yet smart for being able to derive it.

That was when calculus really started making sense to me. I realized that was where all those formulas came from and that I didn't need to memorize them anymore. I got 43/50 but will admit I guessed right on 3 or 4 of them. Got the first one wrong by clicking the wrong line.

jharvey963

01-12-2012, 11:22 AM

BTW OP, did you find that quiz the same way I did, through the Google doodle?

No. It was actually an interstitial link in a news article I read.

J.

MikeF

01-12-2012, 01:12 PM

You guys are smart! 37/50. A few of the correct were simply guesses but I also got a couple wrong by answering too fast or by mis-clicking.

Greg Charles

01-12-2012, 01:29 PM

I'm surprised nimbus is the one that gave most people problems. Not eukaryote? I don't remember ever hearing that word, but don't TV weathermen talk about cumulonimbus clouds? (Yes, OK, I should have seen "eu" like in euphonious, means good. I didn't think of that in time.)

I was only able to get palladium by knowing Pallas was another name for Athena, so that wasn't really about science. I did know Eris, but I would have been able to get it anyway from the "goddess of discord" hint.

Rhiannon8404

01-12-2012, 01:33 PM

I'm actually pretty proud of my 32/50 score. I did not think I would do that well. Science has never interested me and the last time I took a proper science class was junior year of high school Chemistry (1986). That being said, a number of the ones I got right are because I have a working knowledge of Greek and Latin roots.

blue infinity

01-12-2012, 01:41 PM

47 with some educated guessing.

constanze

01-12-2012, 01:42 PM

40/50.

Besides the already mentioned awful lot of clicking, I too found a lot of questions not very science-oriented - I got several with the Greek names, not by knowing the concepts.

I also dislike the strong US layperson centric - billions and millions instead of the usual 10 to the power of ... which is used in science for a reason. Even if the UK has now followed US usage, that still doesn't mean billions are the same everywhere. I also didn't know some of the derived English names (for triangles) etc.

For a real test, I would want more testing whether somebody understands the concept, and not, whether he knows what lowercase greek letter is used for friction, or that quarks are related to poetry instead of milk products.

Lord Il Palazzo

01-12-2012, 01:44 PM

I'm surprised nimbus is the one that gave most people problems. Not eukaryote? I don't remember ever hearing that word, but don't TV weathermen talk about cumulonimbus clouds? (Yes, OK, I should have seen "eu" like in euphonious, means good. I didn't think of that in time.)The eukaryote question was one that I got because of the root involved. I couldn't think of any words with similar roots or connections to nimbus and the weatherman I listen to on the radio rarely refers to types of clouds, so I had to guess and missed it.

Terminus Est

01-12-2012, 01:53 PM

46/50. The only one I am embarrassed to have gotten wrong is nanometers - off by an order of magnitude. (Seriously, real scientists don't use centimeters much.)

Belrix

01-12-2012, 02:57 PM

46.

How am I supposed to remember my greek constants after all this time? "mu" ??

RadicalPi

01-12-2012, 03:20 PM

I also dislike the strong US layperson centric - billions and millions instead of the usual 10 to the power of ... which is used in science for a reason. Even if the UK has now followed US usage, that still doesn't mean billions are the same everywhere.

I'm not sure if this makes sense. If the British use the same system as the Americans, how is that US-centric? Or are you complaining about the false cognate billion between English and other European languages? But there are a great many false cognates. Why focus on this one?

Angua

01-12-2012, 03:24 PM

46/50. The only one I am embarrassed to have gotten wrong is nanometers - off by an order of magnitude. (Seriously, real scientists don't use centimeters much.)

Some of us do. For some insane, unfathomable reason in astronomy/astrophysics the cgs system is used more often than the SI system. This means we use ergs instead of Joules, Gauss instead of Tesla, and yes, cm instead of m.

DCnDC

01-12-2012, 03:38 PM

50/50.

I WAGed on at least 10 of them.

Stelios

01-12-2012, 04:12 PM

36/50. Fell down on quite a few of the physics questions, especially those involving Greek symbols. Considering I haven't had any formal scientific education since I was 16 (now 28), I'm quite pleased with that.

Filbert

01-12-2012, 04:24 PM

39/50

Better than I should have got, to be frank. My physics is awful.

psychobunny

01-12-2012, 04:45 PM

chiroptera

01-12-2012, 04:50 PM

32/50. Apparently I have forgotten everything I've ever learned. However, to be fair, I'm old and I never studied geology or astronomy. At least 5 that I missed were astronomy questions. (We will conveniently ignore the fact that I also missed 3 questions on elements and I was supposedly a chemistry major-I could have done much better with a periodic table in front of me).

So go ahead, heap shame on me because I no longer remember the metric system or what a joule is.

I gave up at number 10 because the site was so slow and cumbersome.

Also I got only 6/10 right (and at least two were complete guesses) so I probably wouldn't even have broken 30. And, I'm OK with that. :)

Shmendrik

01-12-2012, 05:45 PM

47/50

Missed nano, the name of the dwarf planet bigger than Pluto, and the meaning of -nimbus.

Terr

01-12-2012, 05:53 PM

44/50. Pretty pathetic.

mcgato

01-12-2012, 06:08 PM

43 out of 50. Muffed a couple, but guessed right on a few, so it evens out.

Ludovic

01-12-2012, 06:52 PM

45, I only guessed on a couple but like others here, I was immensely helped by the inclusion of etymology information. I even skipped right to the answer occasionally when I saw the etymology (no, those weren't the ones I missed :))

Nuveena

01-12-2012, 07:13 PM

46.

How am I supposed to remember my greek constants after all this time? "mu" ??
Knock Knock
Who's there?
Interrupting Cow
Interrrup-
MOOOOOOOO!

Knock Knock
Who's there?
Interrupting Coefficient of Friction
Interrup-
Muuuuuuuu!

That's why I remember that one. (I got 44 btw).

Leaffan

01-12-2012, 08:51 PM

37/50 and I think that's a fair score.

I'm guessing we won't get responses from the 20/50 crowd though.

SDMBKL

01-12-2012, 10:20 PM

Just found this quiz:

Science Quiz (http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1209/Are-you-scientifically-literate-Take-our-quiz/Composing-about-78-percent-of-the-air-at-sea-level-what-is-the-most-common-gas-in-the-Earth-s-atmosphere)

It was much harder than I expected. I thought I was reasonably science-astute, but I only got 36 out of 50.

J.

I got 41 out of 50. I was a little annoyed at the one-problem-per-page part. I think it's for generating revenue by hosting ads, as some of the comments on that page suggest. Yea! It looks like I beat the OP!

GIGObuster

01-12-2012, 11:07 PM

41/50 Damn Nimbus cloud! :)

It was not knowing Greek, but Greek mythology that helped me answer several questions.

TimeWinder

01-12-2012, 11:30 PM

45. Missed methane, mu, meitosis, Max Planck, and the nanometers one by reading it as "meters" instead of centimeters. Proving that I'm a genius with questions whose answers don't start with "m", apparently.

constanze

01-13-2012, 03:36 AM

46.

How am I supposed to remember my greek constants after all this time? "mu" ??

Esp. because we didn't call it "mu" - it was pronounced mü, written with the greek letter.

And yes, I messed that up, too, because I know the order milli-mikro-nano as 10 to minus 3, minus 6 and minus 9 METERS not cm.

constanze

01-13-2012, 03:42 AM

I'm not sure if this makes sense. If the British use the same system as the Americans, how is that US-centric? Or are you complaining about the false cognate billion between English and other European languages? But there are a great many false cognates. Why focus on this one?

Because the Brits used to have a different (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales) system, like the continent, and only later switched to the US system.

The existence of the different scales means that care must be taken when comparing large numbers between languages or countries, or when interpreting old documents in countries where the dominant scale has changed over time. For example, British-English, French, and Italian historical documents can refer to either the short or long scale, depending on the date of the document, since each of the three countries has used both systems at various times in its history. Today, the United Kingdom officially uses the short scale, but France and Italy use the long scale.

The pre-1974 former British English word billion, post-1961 current French word billion, post-1994 current Italian word bilione, German Billion; Dutch biljoen; Swedish biljon; Finnish biljoona; Danish billion; Spanish billón and the European Portuguese word bilião (with an alternate spelling to the Brazilian Portuguese variant) all refer to 1012, being long-scale terms. Therefore, each of these words translates to the American English or post-1974 modern British English word: trillion (1012 in the short scale), and not billion (109 in the short scale).

And other false cognates didn't come up in this science quiz.

Like I said, real scientists use ISO units and powers of ten to avoid the whole language problems (and to make calculation easier than writing out strings of zeroes).

Other problems with English, of course - we don't use a greek name for an uneven triangle, because that's the normal case. We use words to denote triangles that are different because they are equiliteral or right-angled or otherwise odd, but the norm is only that a triangle has three sides.

Or "name the element with Nr. 12 and symbol K" it's called Kalium in my language, but I can never remember that it's called potassium in English (but I could eliminate the other choices).

That's precisly the reason why chemical and math symbols were invented in the first place, to eliminate problems with different languages.

Nancarrow

01-13-2012, 06:53 AM

49/50.

Yes... those f'in CLOUDS. :mad:

DrumBum

01-13-2012, 07:49 AM

49 out of 50.

I guessed wrong on the Mitosis / Meiosis :smack:

High school Biology was so long ago...

Gyrate

01-13-2012, 07:54 AM

When it asks the age of the Earth, do they want the age now or the age it was when you started the quiz? Two freaking hours, it took me.

48/50 - not bad for a music major, although it came as a shock to realize that I've never used the number e in my life.

Maus Magill

01-13-2012, 08:56 AM

44/50. I'm annoyed, because had I not second guessed myself, I'd have scored 47/50.

El_Kabong

01-13-2012, 09:10 AM

35/50; did pretty well on the earth science and chem questions, not so much on the maths and anything involving greek letters, and made a few stupid mistakes on the cosmology ones. And yes, whoever came up with that 'one question per page, reload everything twice' deal should be forced to answer obscure science questions every day for the rest of their lives. CSM isn't the only site that does that, but Lord, it's annoying.

On question 45, I coudn't remember whether the correct answer was Planck or the fourth name on the list. This of course is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

:D

njtt

01-13-2012, 09:44 AM

Other problems with English, of course - we don't use a greek name for an uneven triangle, because that's the normal case. We use words to denote triangles that are different because they are equiliteral or right-angled or otherwise odd, but the norm is only that a triangle has three sides.

Who is "we" supposed to be here? I learned the word "scalene" for an unevenly sided triangle in my English high school. It is perfectly cromulent British (and American) English. If you don't know it, you don't know it, but that is not because some normative "we" don't use it.

CrimeThink

01-13-2012, 10:11 AM

33/50. I feel like a dumb-dumb now. Especially since I majored in Biology.

garygnu

01-13-2012, 10:39 AM

41/50, including a few I just plain old picked the "other one" when I knew I shouldn't.

I knew the palladium one because of Poe's "The Raven."

AHunter3

01-13-2012, 11:22 AM

44 of 50 for a total of 88%.

Not half bad for a social sciences / musician type :)

constanze

01-13-2012, 11:40 AM

Who is "we" supposed to be here? I learned the word "scalene" for an unevenly sided triangle in my English high school. It is perfectly cromulent British (and American) English. If you don't know it, you don't know it, but that is not because some normative "we" don't use it.

I meant "we" = non-English speaking people. In that case, German.

dict.leo.org translates "scalene" to ungleichmässig, which simply means "not-equallateral".

clairobscur

01-13-2012, 03:01 PM

Don't know my score because at some point the site stopped responding and there was no way I would redo it.

Anyway, I agree that it wasn't a proper "science" quizz. I got answers right for knowing enough Greek mythology to remember the alternate name of Athena or who the sons of Saturn were, and others wrong because they were "technicalities", like the greek letter used for the coefficient of friction. In both cases, that's not my understanding of science that was tested.

constanze

01-13-2012, 03:07 PM

It should define "literacy" first - does literacy in Literature mean, for example, that you read the Cliff notes of the major works and know the characters of "War and Peace" - or does it mean that you read the book and were blown away by the insights it gave you, the new perspectives, the interesting characters you could emphasize with?

Guessing that Palladium is where half of the world's amount is used in Cat Converters from the figurine companion of the Goddess Athena hasn't got anything to do with science, because all the context is missing:

Is this the known total amount of Palladium, or the easily accessible one?
How much palladium is recycled from old Cat convert.s? How easy is it to recycle it? Are there enough facilities and laws to make sure it is recycled?
Where is it mined, and under what conditions (see rare earth in the Congo conflict, similar to blood diamonds)?

I would also like to know why Palladium - I always learnt that the Cat converts. use Platin as a catalyst, which facilitates a reaction but doesn't get used up and should therefore be up for recycling.

DianaG

01-13-2012, 04:04 PM

33/50. I feel like a dumb-dumb now. Especially since I majored in Biology.
37/50. I have a GED and a give 'em hell attitude. ;)

Seriously, I agree with whoever upthread noted that it's at least as much a trivia test as a scientific literacy test. Or at least a common sense/general literacy test. I don't know much 'bout no science, but I'm smart enough to realize that an Austrian monk is most likely studying pea plants, and I'd say that my not-impressive-but-higher-than-I-expected score is due more to some proficiency with etymology than science.

Guessing that Palladium is where half of the world's amount is used in Cat Converters from the figurine companion of the Goddess Athena hasn't got anything to do with science, because all the context is missing
Yeah, this. Likewise, knowing "quark" from Joyce isn't scientific literacy.

Never mind two clicks per answer, would it have killed them to put ten questions on a page?

robardin

01-13-2012, 04:41 PM

47/50 -- I found knowing a bit of Latin and Greek was a help.

46/50 for me, and I agree, several of my correct answers were based on things like "means X in Ancient Greek" or "derives from a name for the Greek goddess Athena".

I got two wrong that I had down to a 50/50 choice, and in fact would have had right based on my first instinct but decided for some reason to overrule the other way: I couldn't remember which was which between "mitosis" and "meiosis" but remembered the meanings (one for cell division and the other for gene-swapping and recombining In sexual reproduction), and what had the atomic number of 8 that was the "most abundant element in the Earth's crust". I got both of those 50/50 guesses wrong.

Hard luck for me (but equal odds of getting both of them right I guess).

I didn't have much trouble remembering the meanings and names of units or constants (ohm = resistance, h = Planck's constant, mu = friction, etc.), because that sort of thing has always stuck with me; it's what they mean and how to use them that I forget.

robardin

01-13-2012, 04:50 PM

48/50 - not bad for a music major, although it came as a shock to realize that I've never used the number e in my life.

Really? You never had to learn about compound interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_%28mathematical_constant%29#Compound_interest) in economics, or radioactive decay (half-life) in physics (or as an illustration of either use of e in pre-calc)?

I don't remember how to do a fraction of what I learned about of this kind of math... But I remember remembering :)

Khristy

01-14-2012, 01:04 PM

Yea baby... 44/50

God, I'm such a nerd. :D

Mr. Excellent

01-14-2012, 01:24 PM

39/50. I kept screwing up on those lame-ass derived units from physics. (Seriously, who the hell remembers what a newton is once you pass the final? Bah!)

40 here. Yah, the derived unites weren't fun. Nor was that goddamned cloud.

PandaBear77

01-14-2012, 02:11 PM

31/50. The physics stuff and the who-discovered-what stuff nailed me.

Uncle Brother Walker

01-14-2012, 02:13 PM

42/50. I got lucky on quite a few, and some were reduced to either/or choices once the flukes were ruled out.

Got the nano one, even though I misread the question with "meter" and dumbly clicked on the right answer.

Missed the cloud.

A bad click on the dino question threw my confidence right off the bat.

Oh, yeah. I started this test last night but got sleepy after about 1 1/2 hours into it. So I had to restart it this morning. Still took me a while.

ETA: Lotsa physics good guesses and it helped that I still have memorized (most) of the periodic table.

RadicalPi

01-14-2012, 03:34 PM

Because the Brits used to have a different (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales) system, like the continent, and only later switched to the US system. . . .

Like I said, real scientists use ISO units and powers of ten to avoid the whole language problems (and to make calculation easier than writing out strings of zeroes).

True, as far as this goes, but if you know all this stuff, I'm not really sure how you got confused. There's no way this quiz was written before 1974 or in the UK, for example.

Rysdad

01-18-2012, 08:51 PM

43/50

Not bad for a high school dropout.

Gyrate

01-19-2012, 04:40 AM

Really? You never had to learn about compound interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_%28mathematical_constant%29#Compound_interest) in economics, or radioactive decay (half-life) in physics (or as an illustration of either use of e in pre-calc)?I learned what both of those are and how they work but never had to actually solve for either using e.

2square4u

01-19-2012, 06:07 AM

I meant "we" = non-English speaking people. In that case, German.

You can add the Scandinavians to that "we".

ETA: And I agree that quite a few of the questions were more language or culturally related than science related. US stamps and the Greek name for Athena? Really?

astorian

01-19-2012, 09:03 AM

I got 44 out of 50, or 88%.

I concede, I was helped by some of the trivial clues. That is, I knew Pallas was another name for Athena, even though I didn't know what the element palladium was used for. In he same way, I didn't know there was water on Titan... but since Saturn was a Titan, it was easy to guess that one was Saturn's moon.

So... was I really science literate or simply well versed in classical literature and mythology.

Bricker

01-19-2012, 11:52 AM

48/50

ZipperJJ

01-19-2012, 12:30 PM

I'll fess up to 28. I'm not ashamed - more than half!

I would have 31 but I second guessed myself on 3 questions and got them wrong.

vertizontal

01-19-2012, 02:45 PM

44/50

I majored in Music Education, back in the day.

Who the heck knows what 'nimbus' means?
You would've learned that in the meteorology portion of Private Pilot ground school.

MLS

01-20-2012, 02:25 PM

I got 37 out of 50, should have gotten more. But it took, literally, over a half hour to get through the slooooow web pages cluttered with ads, ads, and more ads. I think I lost focus after a while.

Buck Godot

01-20-2012, 04:02 PM

46/50 A number of 2-choice lucky guesses, and 4 2-choice unlucky guesses (cloud, surface gravity, ch4 and redshift discoverer). I should have missed nano also except the answer I thought it was wasn't given (forgot about micro).

Philliam

01-21-2012, 02:15 PM

45/50 - Darn that mitosis and Radon, anyhoo! Not too bad though, for a dumb ol' hippie musician.:cool:

Man With a Cat

01-21-2012, 02:45 PM

46

Better than I thought I'd do, to be honest.

Musicat

01-21-2012, 03:02 PM

38/50, which, if everyone else is honest, is about the lowest score of this bunch.

To be fair, I haven't had to use most of that for 50 years. And I never took astronomy, but didn't miss any of the astronomy questions, so go figure. Maybe I do better on the subjects that I learned outside the classroom.

And the site was lightning-fast for me, although the double-display was a little annoying. Still, it was good to have confirmation immediately.

aerodave

01-21-2012, 03:29 PM

I got all 50. My excuse is that I'm a trivia sponge with very good recall. The only one I didn't know outright without thinking was "Mars". I had to use some deduction on that real quick, but it became apparent that it was the only possible choice.

Don't worry, though...I'd bomb a literature quiz in spectacular "are you mentally handicapped?" fashion.

Mr. Kobayashi

01-21-2012, 03:40 PM

39/50. Can't believe how much chemistry I could remember. Ones I got wrong; Mendel's observations, I thought fruit flies based on fast reproduction cycle. Nanocentimetres I should have known, said 1,000,000. For some reason I thought carbon was the most common element in the crust. The DNA one was a blind guess. So was the Newton on a 200g object. An object's mass and velocity equalling force I should have known. Mathematical constant e; no bloody idea. Friction I misremembered as epsilon, not mu. Triangle question was just embarrassing, I said isosceles. Was torn between Plank and Heisenberg for the sizes of quanta and went for the wrong one. No idea about clouds, seems to be a common theme.

x-ray vision

01-21-2012, 03:51 PM

39/50

According to the answer to question #47, the suffix nimbus added to the name of a cloud indicates "it is precipitating."

Nimbus means "rain", but a cumulonimbus cloud doesn't have to have precipitation falling from it, does it?

Malleus, Incus, Stapes!

01-21-2012, 08:44 PM

36. The chemistry* and physics were cake, but the biology questions killed me.My confidence on those was 25%.

Also 36, and it was exactly the other way around for me. Bio is my thing. Chem and phyisics, not so much.

And why were there math problems on there? Math is a tool of science, not science itself.

Left Hand of Dorkness

01-21-2012, 10:36 PM

41/50. I never took physics (which I highly regret), and my only chemistry was a killer soil chemistry class. On the other hand, I'm decent with Greek roots and great with Greek mythology, and those saved my score from being much lower.

Chronos

01-21-2012, 11:26 PM

48 out of 50: I missed zygote (thought that wasn't until it had a handful of cells, not just one) and nimbus.

On the question about e, you can actually use logarithms in any base to do problems like radioactive decay and compound interest, and e actually shows up more obviously in compound interest than it does in most science problems.

And for the record, Titan does not have liquid water on its surface-- The question just said "liquid", and the liquid on Titan is mostly methane and ammonia.