“E equals MC-wha?
Americans don’t know much about science, and that’s cause for concern”
I love the ‘not.rocket.scientists’ part of the URL, which is why I left it visible.
There’s a javascript launch of the quiz on that page. Instant results when you click. The ‘Next Question’ link becomes a ‘Start Over’ link at the very anti-climactic end. Yes, I clicked it…so I guess I failed.
Americans, in general, don’t know much about anything beyond what’s on TV right now… which makes this a great country for us overeducated yahoos to feel all superior. I love being American.
Then again, that report culls its examples from watching Jay Leno’s “streetwalking” segments. For those of you avoiding NBC or just Leno himself, those segments go out of their way to select the dumbest (and therefore most entertaining :rolleyes: ) responses from people wandering the streets (or Universal Studios, or wherever they are that time).
7/7, yay! Although, one did give me pause - I sure wouldn’t have known it in eighth grade. I won’t say what it was about, for people who haven’t taken it yet.
Seriously, it looks like most of us are kicking ass on this, but that’s no surprise; we are obviously not even remotely a representative sample of the U.S. population, any more than Mensans are.
Speaking of which, Mensa has a sample test on their site, which is kind of a kick (even though the page linked here has a deplorable grammatical error on it):
I had to think about the one that says “Radioactive milk can be made safe by boiling it.” I had no idea what radioactivity was in eighth grade. I think that a lot of people who get it get it because they think, “Oh, radiation bad. Boiling no help. False!” However, if you asked them something trickier like "Microwaves use high-energy radiation to cook food."they’d get it wrong.