Another item to be filed in the 'Americans are dumb as a box of rocks' category.

Pew Research gave the linked 13 question basic science quiz to 1,006 Americans. You can take the test. I answered all 13 correctly. I am not bragging here. The quiz is very basic. The sad thing is, based on the immediate comparison results, only 7% of respondents answered all 13 correctly.

There's a link for the study conclusions which I'm off to take a look at.

http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/

13/13

We are doomed.

Question: Which gas makes up most of the Earth’s atmosphere?

20% got this one right. This was the *hardest* question on the survey.

I'm off to slit my wrists. Toodles!

I don't mean to spoil the fun of the quiz; however, just wanted to continue with some results:
Only 47% knew that an electron is smaller than an atom.
Only 20% knew that nitrogen is the largest atmosphere consituent.

What's worse is that the questions are all true/false or multiple choice.

409 of the 1006 are reported to be college graduates. Ugh!

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And people are making shit up to bitch about the proposed Common Core standards.

(February 18, 2014 at 7:22 pm)Cato Wrote: What's worse is that the questions are all true/false or multiple choice.

Which means of course, that 100% of the respondents picking a random answer should yield approximately 50% correct answers. There were four true/false questions. The rate of correct answers for those was 66%, 47%, 48%, and 77%.

:headdesk:

(February 18, 2014 at 7:14 pm)Cato Wrote: Another item to be filed in the 'Americans are dumb as a box of rocks' category.

Pew Research gave the linked 13 question basic science quiz to 1,006 Americans. You can take the test. I answered all 13 correctly. I am not bragging here. The quiz is very basic. The sad thing is, based on the immediate comparison results, only 7% of respondents answered all 13 correctly.

There's a link for the study conclusions which I'm off to take a look at.

http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/

Really how bad is the US school system may I ask? Are we talking about say the quality of the state of Tasmania's in Australia or even worse than that?

To give an example of the quality of the Tasmanian education system. Half of all Tasmanians aged 15 to 74 are functionally illiterate and even more so functionally innumerate. Both meaning they don't have the skills needed to get by in the modern world, like filling out forms, or reading the instructions on their prescription.

Anyway I scored 13/13 which should be expected for somebody (like myself) who has done Year 10 (Grade 10) Science.

I'll be honest. I got the chemical reaction question wrong. Those always tripped me up in college. 12/13. The 85th percentile. Only the strongest survive...

I'm amazed that it was as good as it was.

Yep, 13/13 for me too - "better than 93% of the [American?] public and the same as 7%." It's nice but rather a hollow victory, seeing that the sample size was only 1,006.

(February 18, 2014 at 7:33 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote: I'll be honest. I got the chemical reaction question wrong. Those always tripped me up in college. 12/13. The 85th percentile. Only the strongest survive...

Same here, same question too. I always sucked at chemistry.

12/13 I wasn't sure about the atmosphere question