Skip to main content

Almost No One Could Get All These Basic Science Questions Right. Can You?

Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 10.50.47 AM

Pop quiz! If you’ve finished school and that phrase sends chills down your spine, I apologize, but you should be equally disturbed by the basic science facts that many people got wrong in this Pew Research quiz.

Recommended Videos

Here’s a brief, spoiler-free preview of how people fared on some of the questions:

1424928715410806309

If you’d like to accurately test yourself against the rest of the knowledge of U.S. adults, head to the quiz link above before getting into the details of the results below, as answers will be revealed (but that should be fine, because surely you’d know them all already, right?)

While you can take the same quiz online, Pew’s actual survey was conducted last year with 3,278 adults, and online results don’t factor into the ones that yours will be compared with. These are the percentages of survey takers who got each question right:

2015-09-10_science-knowledge_1_01

But perhaps more telling than how many people got each question right was how many people got all of them right: 6%. However, Americans overall answered more questions right than wrong, so … yay? Still, it’s kind of hard to count that as a win when the astronomy question on the quiz only asked people not to confuse it with astrology (AKA nonsense), which almost a quarter of respondents did. It’s hard to know about science when you don’t even know what science is.

(via Gizmodo, image via JD Hancock)

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

Author
Dan Van Winkle
Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct <em>Geekosystem</em> (RIP), and then at <em>The Mary Sue</em> starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at <em>Smash Bros.</em>

Filed Under:

Follow The Mary Sue: