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Each year the government asks 10 simple questions to test the public's knowledge of science. Can you correctly answer them all?
Each year the government asks 10 simple questions to test the public's knowledge of science. Can you correctly answer them all?
Dave Mosher,Jenny ChengMay 27, 2018, 19:36 IST
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Every two years, the National Science Foundation is required to tell the president how the US is doing in regard to science and engineering.
"As economies worldwide grow increasingly knowledge-intensive and interdependent, capacity for innovation becomes ever more critical," the NSF says in its latest report, titled "Science & Engineering Indicators 2018."
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The news is OK, but not great. Americans are increasingly interested in environmental issues, the report says, and relative to previous years, they're expressing more concern about climate change and humanity's role in it. They also trust scientists more than roles in any other institution aside from the military.
But the US lags behind dozens of countries in the rate of awarding bachelor's and advanced degrees in science, technology, math, or engineering.
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The American public also isn't doing much better on 10 simple questions the NSF asks to test the public's understanding of science.
Scroll down to see the questions the NSF asked for the latest report, see how many answers you can get right, and then compare how 11 countries who asked the same science questions performed.
This is the best theory that we have as to how the universe began: a point of infinite density at the beginning of the universe began to expand and created the galaxies, planets, and stars that we see — still in motion — today. People call this "the Big Bang," though it's not technically an explosion.
"For an explosion to occur, it requires per-existing space and the material will be distributed or scattered in that space. For example, a star explodes and distributes material in the space," Nabin Rijal, a PhD student in nuclear astrophysics Florida State University, wrote in an email to Business Insider. "The Big Bang is very different than that. It is the expansion of space itself. Materials (elementary particles-antiparticles) are created in the process of expansion. [...] So, calling it an explosion would be wrong."
How the US and other nations did:
Question 8:
The correct answer...
Sex is determined by two chromosomes, and sperm carries one of them: either an X (female) chromosome or a Y (male) chromosome. Whichever sperm makes it to the egg first to join an X chromosome in the mother's egg determines the baby's sex. (XX is a girl and XY is a boy, anatomically speaking.)
Fossils in the ground, genetic studies, and other research over the past century has shown again and again that evolution not only gave rise to species like humans, but will continue to shape the forms of our descendants.
How the US and other nations did:
Here's how all 11 nations performed across all of the science questions.
Countries didn't collect poll or report data on certain questions (i.e. "N/A") had those items excluded from the overall average.
From best to worst, the ranking for 2017 is: Canada, Israel, the EU, South Korea, the US, Switzerland, Japan, Malaysia, India, China, and Russia.
The US effectively got a D- average while the top country, Canada, got a C-.