Saturday, April 27, 2013

Pew Quiz on Science and Technology

The Pew Trust quizzed 1000 randomly-selected people about general knowledge of Science and Technology and then invited people interested in the report to take the quiz, themselves.  The quiz, as well as the report is here. The results tend to be all over the map and only one of them has to do with the history of the earth.  I think that if you structured a quiz around that topic, the results would be much worse. 

For the quiz, almost 80% of people knew that the main role of red blood cells is to carry oxygen to the cells, while only 20% of those quizzed knew that nitrogen makes up most of atmospheric gas.  The only prehistorically-based question: "The continents have been moving over millions of years and will continue to move" was good, with 77% of people correctly answering it. The sobering take-away message, though, is that if you got all of them right (I did), you did better than 93% of those quizzed.  I wonder how people would do on the Dinosaur quiz (yesterday's post)?

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