How Scientifically Literate Are You?

I was peaking into your curtains. Yes you did get the demographic questions wrong, but they did not even give you a correct choice to pick for gender.

Don't give them too much credit.The school systems are broken and I can imagine most 5th and 6th graders failing a quiz like that.

Yah, and I looked for both "All the above", "None of the above" and "Don't know". Couldn't find either of the three.I blame the christian right for this blatant discrimination.What really gets my gall though were the age ranges. Mine's not there. We know age discrimination exists in this society but this is just plain wrong. Even a generic "Yes" would have been acceptable.Guess you just gotta take the good with the bad. Such is life in America.

I scored 13 but I got my age age sex wrong.

Oh all right, I got two wrong. I did think it was probably Nitrogen but I said Carbon Dioxide, and I put Infrared when I should have said Ultraviolet. I don't get out much these days and being over 70 maybe I have the excuse of an ossified brain. I'm sure you all can think of more interesting explanations.

No big deal. Your score is still better than 75% of the general public. FWIW, I tutored a college student last week who was a bit tentative on a question about photons/sec for blue light vs. yellow light of the same intensity. (The student did get the question right though).You can alway go back and take that test again and report a perfect score!

I got 11 too But, to qualify it, my asian girlfriend and I were taking the test together. So I may have done worse if left alone.- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

I had never heard of "fracking" but it was easy enough to figure out from the options given. I think I could have gotten the other 12 when I was 12.I couldn't do a test for gender because I'm at the Public Library, so I had to go on memory.

I'm sure I'd have gotten all of them when I was twelve too. Maybe not fracking though.

I hope you're forgetting things naturally and not deliberately unlearning them. Somehow, I associated "fracking" with something plus cracking - which led me to petrochemicals.

It's them christian fundies again, isn't it.So when you found a site more tolerant of direct empirical methods were your results as expected or is the p-value still too high? Edited by AZPaul3, : OK, this is the last one, I promise.

Peeking is cheating. If you are going to peek at your junk, why not just google all of the test answers.

Oni writes: I am immediately thinking of the opening scene of "You Only Live Twice" starring Sean Connery....

NoNukes writes: Oh my goodness!!! is there a new definition of googling now?? How did I miss this? Gotta know - is this the better way?

Before getting all smug about how easy the questions are and expressing mock outrage that anyone could get them wrong, it's worth considering that we're all chatting here on a science themed forum - suggesting that everyone here has an above average interest in science, and thus should be expected to do better than average at a test of science literacy.I think it's more interesting to look at which questions people were bad at. Most of the questions were answered correctly by the majority, two by slightly less than half - only one did the overwhelming majority (4 out of 5) get wrong - the question about the most common gas in the atmosphere. Knowledge of this one seemed to decline with age as well.By contrast, the one that the highest number of people got right was about sun-tan lotion protecting us from UV. Do we have advertising to thank for this?