What Is the Most Common Gas in Earth's Atmosphere?

[M Quack]

I don't like multiple choice tests; knowing which answers are wrong does not make me feel literate in a given area. It makes me feel like an impostor because if anyone were to ask me how I knew my answers were correct, I'd have to admit to heavy use of deductive reasoning rather than my knowledge and application of the theory behind whatever principle is being asked about.

Using deductive reasoning is much more scientific than just memorizing a lot of random stuff.

 

[Infinitum]

96%, I blame Biology.Also, I want to strangle someone.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

82%, got wrong the following:

- In 1989, the US postal service drew criticism from paleontologists for releasing a stamp with what obsolete genus name, which translates from Greek as "Thunder Lizard"?
- What is the heaviest noble gas?
- What moon, the largest moon orbiting Saturn, is the only known object in the solar system other than Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface?
- The 2006 demotion of Pluto to the status of dwarf planet was precipitated by the discovery of what object orbiting beyond Pluto, believed to be 27 percent more massive than Pluto and named for the Greek goddess of strife and discord?
- In classical mechanics, what is defined as the product of an object's mass and velocity?
- The mathematical constant e is defined as the base of the natural system of logarithms, having a numerical value of approximately what?
- What word, which derives from a Greek term meaning "unequal" or "bent," describes a triangle whose three sides are of unequal length?
- Over half of the world's supply of what element, which gets its name from the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, is used in catalytic converters?
- In meteorology, what does the suffix -nimbus added to the name of a cloud indicate?

A few of them I kicked myself over upon seeing the answer. IMO not much of this quiz is about science literacy. I'd say questions concerning what is science, how does the scientific method work, what is peer review etc a long with a few basic questions from each field (rather than random trivia questions) would be a far better test.

 

[DaveC426913]

IMO not much of this quiz is about science literacy. I'd say questions concerning what is science, how does the scientific method work, what is peer review etc a long with a few basic questions from each field (rather than random trivia questions) would be a far better test.

In http://www.herogames.com/home.htm, that would be the difference between
- a Knowledge Skill (do you know lots about something), and
- a Professional Skill (do you know how to make a living doing something).

Oops. My freak flag slipped out. I'll just tuck that back in...

 

[Kholdstare]

82%, got wrong the following:

- In 1989, the US postal service drew criticism from paleontologists for releasing a stamp with what obsolete genus name, which translates from Greek as "Thunder Lizard"?
- What is the heaviest noble gas?
- What moon, the largest moon orbiting Saturn, is the only known object in the solar system other than Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface?
- The 2006 demotion of Pluto to the status of dwarf planet was precipitated by the discovery of what object orbiting beyond Pluto, believed to be 27 percent more massive than Pluto and named for the Greek goddess of strife and discord?
- In classical mechanics, what is defined as the product of an object's mass and velocity?
- The mathematical constant e is defined as the base of the natural system of logarithms, having a numerical value of approximately what?
- What word, which derives from a Greek term meaning "unequal" or "bent," describes a triangle whose three sides are of unequal length?
- Over half of the world's supply of what element, which gets its name from the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, is used in catalytic converters?
- In meteorology, what does the suffix -nimbus added to the name of a cloud indicate?

A few of them I kicked myself over upon seeing the answer. IMO not much of this quiz is about science literacy. I'd say questions concerning what is science, how does the scientific method work, what is peer review etc a long with a few basic questions from each field (rather than random trivia questions) would be a far better test.

I absolutely agree with Ryan. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". If you teach a guy only science trivia or information rather than teaching the proper way to do science, he may not do it right in the future.

 

[DaveC426913]

I absolutely agree with Ryan. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". If you teach a guy only science trivia or information rather than teaching the proper way to do science, he may not do it right in the future.

Ah, but how many actually do science as a profession?

Do you not think that people who are not science professionals should know their science facts?

 

[Ibix]

Ah, but how many actually do science as a profession?

Do you not think that people who are not science professionals should know their science facts?

While I agree that some knowledge of science facts is useful, my opinion is that scientific methodology is far more useful in everyday life. I've never used my knowledge of Newton's law of gravity for anything except a little game programming. I use the ideas of hypothesis formation, systematic testing, and 'no dogma' (to one extent or another!) nearly every time I think about a problem.

Analogy: I think there's more utility in being able to sketch than there is in knowing your cubist from your post-impressionist, for most people.

 

[OmCheeto]

While I agree that some knowledge of science facts is useful, my opinion is that scientific methodology is far more useful in everyday life. I've never used my knowledge of Newton's law of gravity for anything except a little game programming. I use the ideas of hypothesis formation, systematic testing, and 'no dogma' (to one extent or another!) nearly every time I think about a problem.

Analogy: I think there's more utility in being able to sketch than there is in knowing your cubist from your post-impressionist, for most people.

I'd like to know how everyone figured out the following:

6. How many nanometers are there in a centimeter?
1,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000

Only an idiot savant or a mathematical order of magnitude nerd would know this off the top of his head.

I think I spent the most time on this one. Just looking at it now, I can only guess that it's one of the last two.

 

[PAllen]

I'd like to know how everyone figured out the following:
Only an idiot savant or a mathematical order of magnitude nerd would know this off the top of his head.

I think I spent the most time on this one. Just looking at it now, I can only guess that it's one of the last two.

centi : 10^-2
nano: 10^-9

divide: 10^7

I should think a few seconds is much longer than needed for this one.

 

[OmCheeto]

centi : 10^-2
nano: 10^-9

divide: 10^7

I should think a few seconds is much longer than needed for this one.

If you didn't know: "centi : 10^-2 & nano: 10^-9", how would you have solved the problem?

I rest my case.

-----------------------------------
/me sticks fingers in ears, waiting for infraction bomb!

 

[Andre]

Depends, if you happen to live metric, you learn "deci" in the third grade or something. Centimeters and decimeters or even decameters (10) and hecto meters (100) are just as common as furlongs, forthnights, etc.

 

[OmCheeto]

Depends, if you happen to live metric, you learn "deci" in the third grade or something. Centimeters and decimeters or even decameters (10) and hecto meters (100) are just as common as furlongs, forthnights, etc.

Yah. But a nano? That's somewhere around a pico isn't it? Maybe it's just my dyslexia.

ps. I'm still trying to figure out how I solved the problem. My brain must have been in gear that day.

 

[fluidistic]

Eighty six. Shamefully I missed the how many nanometers is there in a centimeter. I knew that 1nm=10^-9m and 1cm=10^-2m making the answer 10^7, I don't know how I failed that question lol. I guess I miscounted the 0's...

 

[DaveC426913]

Yah. But a nano? That's somewhere around a pico isn't it? Maybe it's just my dyslexia.

Around these parts, nano is beaten into our heads.

Maybe it's a non-American thing.

 

[AnTiFreeze3]

Around these parts, nano is beaten into our heads.

Maybe it's a non-American thing.

Americans shun the metric system like you normal-measurement-using-people wouldn't believe.

 

[OmCheeto]

Eighty six. Shamefully I missed the how many nanometers is there in a centimeter. I knew that 1nm=10^-9m and 1cm=10^-2m making the answer 10^7, I don't know how I failed that question lol. I guess I miscounted the 0's...

Sometimes being ignorant has its advantages. (I'm referring to myself of course.)

6. How many nanometers are there in a centimeter?
1,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000

I knew:
there were 100 centimeters to the meter
the nanometer would be multiple of 1000 if the question were about the meter
it wasn't, so I knew 1 & 2 were wrong
millimeters fall in the 1000 multiple, so I just asked myself; "How many millimeters to a centimeter"?

The answer is 10. So 3 was the only logical choice.

If the 4th choice had been 10 billion, I would have only had a 50/50 chance of getting it right, since until today, I didn't know my femptos, from picos, from nanos.

But now I do. I've been practicing with baseball problems.

 

[Andre]

Around these parts, nano is beaten into our heads.

Maybe it's a non-American thing.

Maybe it is because of Mork from Ork

 

[Ryan_m_b]

In http://www.herogames.com/home.htm, that would be the difference between
- a Knowledge Skill (do you know lots about something), and
- a Professional Skill (do you know how to make a living doing something).

Oops. My freak flag slipped out. I'll just tuck that back in...

My geekometer just gave a reading of other 9000 For another geek culture reference it's a bit like Asimov's foundation series. The decadent Empire becomes so stagnant that being an academic or engineer just means one has memorised all the information in the libraries without knowing how it came about or understanding the scientific process.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

Americans shun the metric system like you normal-measurement-using-people wouldn't believe.

The obvious practical measurement system is light nanoseconds and inches.

 

[M Quack]

The obvious practical measurement system is light nanoseconds and inches.

Nanoseconds don't contain any fat to begin with. But I guess they will sell better if you label them "light".

But seriously, the conversion from cm to nm was about the only thing in the quiz that imho every scientifically literate person should get right.

All the rest was remembering random trivia that you know if you use them every day and that are fairly useless if you don't . No deduction, no math, no basic logic, no recognizing correlation and possible causation (number of pirates and global warming...), no question about how things work, no science. Just vocabulary.

The PISA test does a much better job.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/29/33707226.pdf

 

[OmCheeto]

...
But seriously, the conversion from cm to nm was about the only thing in the quiz that imho every scientifically literate person should get right.
...

Well, I was interested in the fact that I seemed to be the only person on the planet apparently that didn't know what a nano was, even though I'd spent several years in electrical engineering school. (This was about 30 years ago btw) But I remembered the term picofarads being used a lot. Why didn't I remember ever hearing about nanofarads, nor millifarads for that matter? So I googled it, and found a simple, yet still unexplained reason:

The millifarad is less used in practice, so that a capacitance of 4.7×10−3 F, for example, is sometimes written as 4700 µF; industrial parts at times use the abbreviation MFD. North American usage also avoids nanofarads: a capacitance of 1×10−9 F will frequently be indicated as 1000 pF; and a capacitance of 1×10−7 F as 0.1 μF.

I'll have to stop by the electronics store this afternoon and ask if they sell nano-range capacitors.

 

[Galteeth]

I got 66 percent.

In my defense, I'm not a professional scientist and I never finished college.

EDIT:
It would have been interesting to see percentages for individual questions amongst readers who took the quiz. I didn't think any of the questions were super obscure, i felt like I should have gotten all of them.

 

[PAllen]

Well, I was interested in the fact that I seemed to be the only person on the planet apparently that didn't know what a nano was, even though I'd spent several years in electrical engineering school. (This was about 30 years ago btw) But I remembered the term picofarads being used a lot. Why didn't I remember ever hearing about nanofarads, nor millifarads for that matter? So I googled it, and found a simple, yet still unexplained reason:

I have a nano in my car replacing 60 cds. It is a few centimeters. Wait, that can't be right ...

 

[zoobyshoe]

The PISA test does a much better job.

I predict the same people who did the best (scored over 90%) on the first quiz would also be the top scorers on the PISA test. You won't see a sudden drop due to eliminating success by memorization of vocabulary and trivia.

Outside of an autistic savant (or anyone who memorizes to memorize), anyone who finds themselves in possession of a bunch of science trivia (i.e. names of Saturn's moons) will have picked it up from sources that are just about guaranteed to also expose them to discussions of the scientific method.

 

[Evo]

Outside of an autistic savant (or anyone who memorizes to memorize), anyone who finds themselves in possession of a bunch of science trivia (i.e. names of Saturn's moons) will have picked it up from sources that are just about guaranteed to also expose them to discussions of the scientific method.

I found that most of my answers came from watching tv shows. Of course most of the shows I watch are science documentaries, so there are lots of answers and little of the method.

 

[lisab]

- In meteorology, what does the suffix -nimbus added to the name of a cloud indicate?

I got that one wrong too.

Spoiler

I really had no idea, but I remembered Harry Potter's broom was a "Nimbus 2000". Since one of the possible answers had something to do with altitude, I chose that one. I mean, who would name a broom after precipitation?!

 

[M Quack]

Nimbus, from the Latin for "dark cloud", may refer to: ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus

BTW, Radiospares France lists plenty of condensers with nF capacitance.

Nanosciences are all the rage now. Even Nature has sprouted a "Nanotechnology" branch. If your research proposal does not have "nano" in it, you might as well not bother writing it.

http://www.nature.com/nnano/index.html

 

[Whovian]

86%, mostly failed astronomy questions about which moons were where and who's the brightest next to the moon, etc. And I thought nimbus meant vertically developed, not precipitating.

94%. One was the one about nimbus (just as you did,) the next was the one about Bernoulli's Principle (long story, didn't fully understand what the question was asking,) and the other one I got wrong I can't remember.

 

[M Quack]

The millifarad is less used in practice...

Certain people do count in milliFarads. Granted, there are probably less than 10 installations of this type on the planet.

http://www.toulouse.lncmi.cnrs.fr/spip.php?page=article&id_article=98&lang=en

48 mF capacitor bank (back-calcualted from 14 MJ stored energy at 24 kV).

 

[Andre]

I got that one wrong too.
I really had no idea,..

Really, nimbo means trouble here or here.