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

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.

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

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:

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)

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