science literacy quiz -- water on mars, pew research center nonsense Options

[tfisher]

Try this science literacy quiz. Have fun with question 7. I wonder what it says about science literacy in the U.S. when the researchers can't even get it correct!

[mcaplinger]

Have fun with question 7. I wonder what it says about science literacy in the U.S. when the researchers can't even get it correct!

Question 7 is basically "what was recently discovered on Mars?" and the answer is water, despite the fact that there was clear detection of water on Mars in the 1950s from ground-based spectroscopy.

Unfortunately I blame this on the Phoenix team for overhyping their results; this is clearly based on their press releases.

[volcanopele]

Well, good to know I won't be shamed by my peers, I got all 12 questions correct.

Yeah, I agree on the water on Mars question, it is ridiculous. Do they know how many times water has been discovered on Mars, according to press releases? At least 15 times by ESA alone Not to mention that for every spacecraft that has ever been sent to Mars, at least one press release has been issued about how it discovered evidence for water on Mars.

[serpens]

The disturbing thing is not the simplicity of the questions but rather that the graph plateaus at 7 out of 10 and only 10% get full marks.

[JohnVV]

getting all 12 correct is VERY,VERY easy
what do you know my percentile for it was about the same is my act/sat's from what i remember ( back in the stone age )

[Den]

Question 7 is basically "what was recently discovered on Mars?" and the answer is water, despite the fact that there was clear detection of water on Mars in the 1950s from ground-based spectroscopy.

They meant "recently in geological times"

Seriously. The more I think about it, the more it looks that actually Mars has a lot of water. It's just all permafrost and in polar caps...

[tedstryk]

I'm sorry, but I worry about the literacy of the moron who wrote that quiz.

[nprev]

Yeah, really. However, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw the bar graph of all the scores...

Probably should cry.

[CosmicRocker]

Well, I took some solace for our species from the fact that the histogram was skewed toward the right, rather than toward the left.

I'm not sure that you can complain too much about the Mars question. I mean, when the choices for recent Martian discoveries are water, platinum, mold, or plants, the process of elimination makes it an easy choice for even the uniformed. It would have been easy to make the question more difficult, but I don't think the author of this quiz wanted to zero in on the few of us science enthusiasts who are in the top percentile.

The overall survey results were very interesting.

A substantial percentage of scientists also say that the news media have done a poor job educating the public. About three-quarters (76%) say a major problem for science is that news reports fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not.

Of course, that is not very surprising, considering the fact that most journalists and reporters these days have no awareness of scientific reality whatsoever.