
What Americans know and don't know about science - shawndumas
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/09/10/what-the-public-knows-and-does-not-know-about-science/
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humanrebar
I expected questions on the scientific method or something. Wouldn't the title
be more accurately "What Americans know and don't know about nature"?

To me, knowing some facts about nature is different than knowing how one would
use a scientific approach to test hypotheses about nature. I'd like to save
the word "science" for the tools and processes. I see too much "because
science" out there, which is basically the opposite of rational, skeptical
thinking.

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Asbostos
Indeed. I think knowing about science is probably more useful and relevant to
the majority of people than trivia. That can be used more generally to
distinguish scams and fearmongering from important issues.

That more than a couple of percent knew the inventor of the Polio vaccine was
a surprise to me. Is he a popular hero in America or something?

Also, height of a sound wave? Don't they mean high of a graph of a sound wave?
It doesn't really move up and down except where it's travelling upwards or
downwards.

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sornars
RE: Polio - I suspect this is because most Americans do know who the other
options (Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein) are. This may be
reflected in the fact that the most obscure of those three (Marie Curie) is
also the one with the most incorrect guesses.

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mnw21cam
Marie Curie is obscure? Now I have heard it all.

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sornars
That was a relative statement; out of the three I'd expect the general public
to recognize Einstein and Newton (in that order) before Curie.

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qntty
Is uranium really needed to make nuclear energy? I was under the impression
that you could use thorium. I only got that question right because the other
options didn't make sense.

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dagw
Thorium reactors are also Uranium reactors. The difference is that instead of
powering the reactor directly with fission of Uranium you feed the reactor
with Thorium which is then transmuted into Uranium in the reactor and then
nuclear fission of that uranium is used to generate power.

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JoeAltmaier
Its complex. Thorium has a long chain of transmuted states called the 'Thorium
Cascade', during which it is twice Radium, twice Polonium, twice Lead and even
twice Thorium (232 and 228)! The form of Uranium it passes thru is called
'synthetic' and is not the kind that makes bombs. All steps in the cascade
generate power.

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jameshart
Apparently sound waves aren't used to make cellphone calls. I thought the
whole point of phones was to receive and emit sound waves.

Like many tests this comes down to being good at knowing what the question
asker is really after. It amounts to a test of how good are you at
standardized tests.

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zardo
Phones work by displaying text and detecting keypresses, everyone knows that.

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jameshart
So last year. Modern phone interfaces are back to soundwaves: "Siri, play
Nicki Minaj".

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antod
I thought the tides question was a bit flawed/ambiguous, despite knowing which
of the answers they were really looking for.

"Which of these is the main way that ocean tides are created?"

Are 'tides' defined as the tidal bulge caused by the moon, or the harmonic
rising and falling of water levels caused by earth's rotation relative to that
bulge?

Would we (laypeople) even recognise there were ocean tides if earth's rotation
was somehow slow enough for the moon to be geostationary? The bulge would
still be there, but without the earth's relative rotation to the moon the sea
level doesn't go up and down any more (ignoring the smaller tides from the
sun).

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kevin_thibedeau
I just blasted through the quiz and got the astrology question wrong because I
didn't read it carefully. The results on the questions that require flawless
English comprehension are suspect.

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denzil
This question was flawed, I believe, as none of the answers for it were
correct. Astrology isn't science and the others don't study effects of stars
on human behavior.

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yarper
Amplitude doesn't directly translate to volume/loudness, in the same way that
frequency does not directly translate to pitch.

For those interested, pitch vs frequency is covered by the mel scale
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_scale)
and "loudness" in decibels is logarithmic (and at best, not a great measure of
volume as perceived by people in different environments).

Seems a bit rich to fail people on this ambiguous question..

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yarper
Hey, why the downvotes?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness)

