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.
44/50. I’m annoyed, because had I not second guessed myself, I’d have scored 47/50.
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.
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.
33/50. I feel like a dumb-dumb now. Especially since I majored in Biology.
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.”
44 of 50 for a total of 88%.
Not half bad for a social sciences / musician type 
I meant “we” = non-English speaking people. In that case, German.
dict.leo.org translates “scalene” to ungleichmässig, which simply means “not-equallateral”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Really? You never had to learn about 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 
Yea baby… 44/50
God, I’m such a nerd.
40 here. Yah, the derived unites weren’t fun. Nor was that goddamned cloud.
31/50. The physics stuff and the who-discovered-what stuff nailed me.
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.
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.
43/50
Not bad for a high school dropout.
I learned what both of those are and how they work but never had to actually solve for either using e.