How Scientifically Literate Are You?

Am I the only one surprised that the answer to the fracking question was natural gas? Not that it's the wrong answer, it isn't, but I thought the economics are driven by oil and that natural gas is just a welcome byproduct. I was expecting to see oil in the list of answers, not natural gas.I don't know what answer I might have given to some of the questions as a kid in the 1960's. Nanotechnology didn't exist and bacterial resistance wasn't a problem that was receiving any widespread attention. The same was true of greenhouse gases, and global cooling seemed as likely as global warming.--Percy

I'm trying to think whether I might have known the definition of "nano" at, say, age 12. I definitely knew what it meant by age 20 since I was working at the nanosecond level in my coursework, but at what point I learned it I'm not sure.--Percy

This is just my guess at things. The full term is hydraulic fracturing, and so I'm guessing that it frist got shortened to hydrofracturing, and then to hydrofracking, and finally to fracking. The problem with the "frac" form is that it doesn't spell well - the alternatives to "fracking" are "fracing" and "fraccing", both of which look funny. So even if Petro is right that the original abbreviated form was "frac", once it leaked out into wider use the more reasonable spelling was inevitable, which is consistent with your blaming it on an outsider group like the environmentalists.But I believe it is even possible that Petro's preferred "frac" is just local to his own community. I was in a programming subcommunity for years where I adopted standard ways of writing code and talking about code that I assumed were universal, only to discover they were local as I began moving around.But according to Wikipedia, "frac" is a geologic term for fractures in rock formations, so the term may have been adopted by well drillers, verbing what was originally a noun, and completely ruining my theory that fracking derives from the term hydraulic fracturing.--Percy