Quiz created: 2014-03-09

Simple Science Quiz

Instructions: Answer the multiple choice questions, guessing if necessary; then click on the "Process Questions" button at the end of the quiz to see your score in the adjacent message box. The program will not reveal which questions you got wrong, only how many points you have. Go back and change your answers until you get them all right. (The message box will rejoice at that point and the page will change color to show it is tickled pink.)

Points to note: (1) Questions with only one possible answer are one point each. (2) Questions with one or more possible answers (represented by check boxes) give a point for each correct answer, but also subtract a point for each wrong answer! (3) The program will not attempt to score your efforts at all if you have not tried at least half of the questions. (4) This quiz is for your own use only. No record of your progress is kept or reported to anyone.

The National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Indicators study, released early in 2014, reported that an extremely easy, ten-question, true-false quiz administered to 2,256 people (presumably adults), produced only 6.5 right answers for the average American respondent. Anyone reading this page should be able to do better than that. (Or else you should put your tail between your legs and slink off into a corner.) Here is the quiz, as reported by the San Diego Union Tribune (2014-03-09, p. A9):
1. The Center of the Earth is very hot.
True  False  No Answer
2. Continents have been shifting their locations for millions of years and will continue to move.
True  False  No Answer
3. Earth orbits around the sun.
True  False  No Answer
4. All radioactivity is man-made.
True  False  No Answer
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms.
True  False  No Answer
6. Lasers work by focusing sound waves.
True  False  No Answer
7. The universe began with a huge explosion.
True  False  No Answer
8. It is the father’s gene that determines whether a baby is a boy or a girl.
True  False  No Answer
9. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
True  False  No Answer
10. Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
True  False  No Answer

      Points out of 10:

Return to top.

This consummately cool, pedagogically compelling, self-correcting,
multiple-choice quiz was produced automatically from
a simple text file of questions using D.K. Jordan's
dubiously original, but publicly accessible
Think Again Quiz Maker
of April 25, 2010.