99% percent of quiztakers know what is Andromeda but only 84% percents of them know that Sun is heavier than Earth? Also only 76% knows the pH of water and 66% knows the function of mitochondria. They are very basic knowledges that any middleschool student can easily answer.
Don't forget that the school systems can be widely differ between countries or even states. And from comments under other quizzes I get the impression that for some people here the middle school was long time ago. Do you really remember everything you learned back then?
Good for you that you can remember everything you ever learned in middle school. I wasn't interested in science back then. Most things I know now I looked up myself when that changed. And multiple choice sometimes makes you rethink logical things or things you thought you knew. Yes, our sun is so much bigger than the earth but is it that clear it's heavier? I mean it's mostly made up of gasses which could easily be lighter no matter the enormous size. Just saying.
That was exactly my thinking when I got the earth/sun question wrong. Knowing how vastly greater the sun is only makes me think it could be a "trick" question. :P
Okay, I can see how, if you didn't have a particular interest in or need to know about astronomy, astrophysics and the like that you might think that was a trick question. But I feel like one basic fact should immediately arrest this line of reasoning: if the Sun were lighter than Earth, the Earth wouldn't orbit the Sun, but rather it would be the other way around. The relative mass of astronomical objects may not be general knowledge, but I was under the impression that the fact that more massive things have stronger gravitational pulls was.
Honestly, if I'd put more thought into it, I would have got it right... but I had a complete brain blarp and decided it had to be a trick question, even though it didn't make sense for the Earth to be heavier xD
I got everything else, except the waves question right. Couldn't remember which way it went for longer or shorter waves -.-
Or the class in question was decades ago. Astronomy and microbiology is useless to the vast majority of adults, so it makes sense that we forget those.
This is a trivia site, and as such, much of what is quizzed here is "trivial", as in "not much use in everyday life." How often does an average person use info like the pH of water or the purpose of mitochondria or whether the sun is heavier than the earth (I'm honestly surprised even 84% get that right)? No need to be shocked that not everyone knows these things.
You don't actually need to know the pH of water to get that question right – you only need a vague sense of how the pH scale works. And if there is anyone here high school age or over that can't logic out that the sun is heavier than the Earth, I am very sad about the state of basic science knowledge in the world. I agree with you that not everyone will know all these answers because some are indeed "trivial" (I had no idea about the 5,000-year-old tree, for example), but most of these questions had choices that could be figured out with basic knowledge that in my opinion, should. be. known.
Having taught middle schoolers I can definitely say next to none of them would know these facts. Perhaps that says something about the US school system...
Having taught both high school and middle school science I would say that trivial knowledge of irrelevant facts are not an indicator of anything. Students who end up in the sciences would know these. Adults who don't work in these fields offload any knowledge that's irrelevant to their current jobs or life.
For example, I imagine there is a higher rate of parents getting the chicken pox answer correct than adult non-parents - especially parents who were around before the vaccine. That doesn't make adults smarter than non-parents. It's just trivia.
"any middleschool student can easily answer" This is true, but once you leave middle school you have to retain the knowledge. People forget a lot of things if they don't use the knowledge in their daily lives. I got 100%, but there is plenty of knowledge I have forgotten that I once knew in middle school.
I think I remembered everything besides the mandatory year of history, and the german die,das der, den, die grammar. (also a mandatory subject which I didnt choose). Ow and maybe some artmovement stuff (again mandatory which I dropped).
I honestly dont think I remember anything I learned in history class. (Only the stuff I allready knew beforehand) I cant think of anything I learned there now anyway, trying hard to think of something.
(I do like history though, but more about civilisations and not about dates of wars and names of generals etc)
No, 99% of people can guess the right answer from the options provided. Don't interpret multiple choice questions without acknowledging the weakness of the process.
If you wanna get pedantic, Andromeda is a character from greek mythology. The Andromeda *constellation* is a constellation. And the Andromeda galaxy is a galaxy. Department of Redundancy Department.
@NINJAQKk there's a company in the US called 23 and me, which offers the service to analyse your genetic sequence (the 23 chromosomes) and give you information about your ancestry, predisposition to illnesses etc. Kal just replaced the correct answer to the genome question in the quiz with one of the wrong options.
That question about the moon was so wrong in terms of expression...it should be *natural satellite cause it basically asks what is the largest natural satellite of our solar system
A moon is a natural satellite of a planet. All sufficiently large objects in the solar system are natural satellites of something, so the answer if it was changed to natural satellite would be the sun.
The word "heavy" generally refers to weight and not mass so question one should probably ask which has the higher mass, not which is heavier.
A better answer to question 8 would probably be to conduct aerobic respiration, as energy is not really "generated" per se, it is released from the glucose and oxygen.
An amount of energy is always measured in joules (or some equivalent unit such as electron-volts or kilowatt-hours), so for question 12 the question could be phrased more generally (though it is fine as it is).
"Heavy" is used in this sense commonly, though, even by astrophysicists. It's commonly understood what is meant by it is how heavy something would be given its mass if it were at normal Earth gravity.
Although it's mostly accepted that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the real answer is no one knows (for sure) because it is unmeasurable. It could be 4.6 or 4.4 billion, for example.
We don't know this for sure. It is based on a theoretical scientific process with no way to verify it is accurate. Carbon dating or any other method used to date the earth is proven to be accurate for items that are relatively "young" because we can look to historical records to verify them, but for items that are millions or billions of years old, there is no evidence by which our dating methods can be verified.
The modern scientific community has a bad habit of accepting unproven scientific theories like this as fact. It would be better to re-word this question something like, "What is accepted by the scientific community as the best approximate age of earth?" The wording of the question here is not correct. They really don't "know" for sure.
I mean, do I know you're not a penguin? I've got a lot of evidence throughout my life that penguins aren't able to type and aren't able to form complex ideas about the derivations of the age of the Earth... but on the other hand, I've never met you. Plus, science can only base its knowledge on the penguins its observed. Is it truly impossible that there's a hyper-intelligent breed of penguins secretly taking JetPunk quizzes? Science can't definitively prove that you're not a penguin. "Is ctleng76 a penguin?" I suppose the answer is: nobody knows.
I agree that the answer should be 'no one knows.' We can show through documentation that a person is a certain age, or when the Coliseum was built. We can use rings to find out the age of a bristlecone pine tree. But with the Earth we are only guessing within a half a billion years? If we could use a half a billion units of anything to approximate the size of anything else, we'd never get any question wrong. How much money does quizzicalguy have in the bank? Something between $1 and $500,000,000. Correct!
This is about how old the Earth is, not the universe. We know how old the Earth is, as QM said above, to a reasonable degree of approximation, and the same is thought to be true of the universe though I recently saw an article saying new evidence suggests that it may be significantly younger (significantly in this context means around 12.5 billion years instead of 13.8 billion years).
Grrr.... I guess so. Sodium is a mineral in the dietary sense. It isn't a mineral in the sense the question was asking. Here's a list of all mineral species. Sodium is absent. In any case, changed the answer to Lithium to avoid further discussion.
What element do organic compounds contain? is a really terrible way to set up a question as organic compounds can have all of the 4 elements mentioned. They are described as generally any chemical compounds that contain carbon-hydrogen bonds.
My study of chemistry at university was many years ago, but from what I remember, there is no official definition of organic compound. I'd say any chemist would agree that carbon is definitely required, and hydrogen is usually required. If you have a covalent bond between carbon atoms and something in the place of hydrogen, I'm not sure if that's still organic or not. Certainly something chemists can discuss and likely disagree upon.
I took organic chemistry last semester. There's no widely agreed upon definition, but the way I learned it and what most scientists (as well as Wikipedia) seem to agree on is that any compound with C-H bonds is considered organic. Thus, something like methane is considered organic and something like carbon dioxide is inorganic.
That being said, the "backbone" of organic compounds is always carbon... so I think the question is okay (although I agree that getting rid of "hydrogen" as an option might make it better).
If you ask different chemists what an organic compound is, they will give you different answers. Some will say that carbon alone makes something organic. However, I find that this definition is too broad as it would include cyanide ions, carbon dioxide, graphite and diamonds. I'm of the opinion that you have to have both carbons and hydrogens to be considered organic.
Regardless, we care more about the material properties these days than the categories they occupy. As such, there is much overlap between fields and where to define the categories is not so clear cut.
But if you consider how many times Earth would fit in the Sun, then you realise that our reasoning was totally stupid! lol
I got everything else, except the waves question right. Couldn't remember which way it went for longer or shorter waves -.-
For example, I imagine there is a higher rate of parents getting the chicken pox answer correct than adult non-parents - especially parents who were around before the vaccine. That doesn't make adults smarter than non-parents. It's just trivia.
I honestly dont think I remember anything I learned in history class. (Only the stuff I allready knew beforehand) I cant think of anything I learned there now anyway, trying hard to think of something.
(I do like history though, but more about civilisations and not about dates of wars and names of generals etc)
They're the same thing..?
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!
The word "heavy" generally refers to weight and not mass so question one should probably ask which has the higher mass, not which is heavier.
A better answer to question 8 would probably be to conduct aerobic respiration, as energy is not really "generated" per se, it is released from the glucose and oxygen.
An amount of energy is always measured in joules (or some equivalent unit such as electron-volts or kilowatt-hours), so for question 12 the question could be phrased more generally (though it is fine as it is).
Overall a very good quiz though.
The modern scientific community has a bad habit of accepting unproven scientific theories like this as fact. It would be better to re-word this question something like, "What is accepted by the scientific community as the best approximate age of earth?" The wording of the question here is not correct. They really don't "know" for sure.
That being said, the "backbone" of organic compounds is always carbon... so I think the question is okay (although I agree that getting rid of "hydrogen" as an option might make it better).
If you ask different chemists what an organic compound is, they will give you different answers. Some will say that carbon alone makes something organic. However, I find that this definition is too broad as it would include cyanide ions, carbon dioxide, graphite and diamonds. I'm of the opinion that you have to have both carbons and hydrogens to be considered organic.
Regardless, we care more about the material properties these days than the categories they occupy. As such, there is much overlap between fields and where to define the categories is not so clear cut.