I got a C (73%), but that was hard!

My dog ate my response.  Maybe my memory is fading but this quiz seemed more in line with what we learned in 5th-6th grade.

Hmmm.  I got an 88%, B.  I suppose that makes me a science geek?

I’m relieved to get a B-, but I wish the quiz would indicate the correct answers so I could learn more about the questions I got wrong!

Connie,
Me too!

Missed one (meteor, etc.) Dawg’ on. Still got an A, though. 

I had a B+ (I missed the question on Meteors too - I never can keep that straight.). I’ve forgotten most of my biology classes - I never took one beyond the 10th grade.

At least I got the other physics and astronomy questions right. Grin.

Nick, I am glad you got the v = at question. 

I definitely did not have newtonian mechanics in the 8th grade. My daughter who went to a private school did. Really amazing and wonderful teachers. She took Calculus this year. She was the only one in her class with a dad that could help with homework!

OK, what’s the deal with the snakes? (76%)

connie and ally,
The Answers ARE there.  Scroll down!
I wouldn’t fret too much over this test.  There is nothing humbling about it.  It is merely a measure of an 8th grader’s ability in having been able to regurgitate answers on science material they studied over the past year.  For adults, what does the result mean?  Perhaps the better question would be what does it NOT mean? 

It does not mean you are dumber than your eightgrader (if they scored better than you).
It does not mean you are dumb from a science perspective (if you scored poorly).
It does not mean you are a rocket scientist (if you scored well).

It DOES mean that you have retained the scientific material you have learnt and which is covered on this quiz.  Is there a value to this finding?  Perhaps.  It seems to me the more meaningful value would lie in this test’s ability to gauge some aspect of our society.  For instance, it would be useful to know if a decline in the percentage of adults scoring a B or higher has decreased over the past 20 years.  Absent such a utility, there’s very little relevance to adults taking this test and consequently no merit to the argument that it is a humbling exercise.

Note that this test does not measure individual test takers against each other which is what we have begun to do here by listing our individual scores.

This is in contradistinction to English and Math tests which aim to measure an adult’s retained skills in these two areas as they reflect their utility in adult work situations.  Those scores have recently highlighted the declining abilities in the adult American population.  That finding is indeed humbling.

I got an A- (92%), and most of that stuff I learned in high school or college or later, not 8th grade.

I noticed that one of the questions had no correct answers:

What causes tides in the ocean?
  1. The polar ice caps
  2. The moon’s gravitational pull
  3. The sun
  4. Wind

The correct answer is “Both the sun’s and moon’s gravitational pulls”, but I correctly guessed the answer they were fishing for (the moon).

If there was no moon, we’d still have tides, but they would be very boring:  Always around noon and midnight, and they would not vary in height (ie., no spring or neap tides), and they would be about 4 times lower than the sun-moon tides.

As a former high-school salutatorian, I’m sure I could pass eighth-grade science if I took the course again, or like the driver’s exam, read through a booklet for ten minutes before taking the test.  As it stands, I got a C this morning.  Oh well, I’m a humanities guy, anyway.

some of the questions are not the best. For instance:

This type of rock is buried deep within the earth’s crust.
Metamorphic rock

They assume that you pick up the code word “buried” as an active event. I assumed that “buried” meant “beneath” so I chose “igneous” as they are buried the most deeply.

The tides question is equally subtle. I personally think that test questions should be no trickier than to discover what the student knows, not how coy and brilliant the teacher is.

Oh, well….

DonGander

DonGander, thanks for explaining why “igneous” was wrong. I didn’t pick up the “clue” and wondered. As someone else said, I wish they had given the correct answers.

#14 ia a trick question.  Anything that falls ends up with zero velocity no matter how fast it was going before it stopped.

They say the answer to the question “is the offspring of an asexual organism identical to its parent” is yes.  Is a self-pollinating plant asexual?  It’s offspring are certainly not identical to itself.  In fact, any organism that produces two kinds of gametes and joins them together will have heterogeneous offspring.

WHOO HOO!  I got an 84!  Can’t wait to show my kids!
Oh, and igneous rocks don’t exist until AFTER they are spewed out of a volcano or fissure and cool.  Prior to that, they are just magma.  Then if they get buried they are “metamorphed” into something else.  Same with sedimentary rocks, if they get buried enough they become metamorphic too.  Pretty tricky.

I barely passed.  :(  But I never was much good at science past the 6th grade.  As a homeschooling mom, I asked my husband to take over math and some science with our boys as I knew it would quickly be above my ken, however—give me an English or grammar test and I’ll bet I could ace it! 

I got a D…but then I ended up as an art major in college.

I did know the one about the snakes though, but then I used to live in western Washington where we had garter snakes abundantly.

I, who write on religion and science, got a C! There is a little consolation in the story that Einstein used to ask the little girl next door to help him with simple math problems. (I’m no Einstein.)

84 - B   and without cramming!! 

D

An eighth grader could probably out preach me too.  Age certainly takes its toll.  Maybe the moon causes memory loss in addition to tides.

73 - C.
I think I missed all the physics questions.  I spent all of 8th grade intro physics trying to recover from my Algebra class the period before.  We had a terrible Algebra teacher.  19 of 20 of us (including me) failed the midterm Algebra exam sent down from the 9th grade. (The school then made sure we got extra tutoring.) I was always so stressed from the awful Algebra class that none of the physics stuck in my head!

Ah memories.
I aced the biology questions.  Had two fantastic biology teachers 9th grade basic and 12th grade AP Bio.  What a difference good teachers make!

100% for me.

For some of them, I had to guess what they thought an 8th-grader would answer—as someone already pointed out, the “tide” question is actually a bit more complicated than that.  Even setting aside the sun factor, it’s not precisely the moon’s gravitational pull that causes tides… or rather, it is, but not directly.  The moon does not “orbit around” the earth, rather the earth and the moon mutually orbit around their common center of mass—which, since the earth is much more massive than the moon, is close to the earth’s own center of mass, in fact still inside the earth.  (Imagine two ice skaters holding hands and twirling around each other, but one ice skater is Orson Welles and the other is Kate Moss.)  That resulting “wobble” is why we get tides both on the side of the earth facing the moon and on the opposite side as well.

But in 8th-grade science, “the moon’s gravitational pull” is probably close enough.

Ross, that is not correct. Tidal forces have nothing to do with orbiting but rather the difference of gravitational forces. It was the great Newton who said the gravitational force falls off as the square of the distance, thus the gravitational tug of the moon on the surface water is relatively more on the close side and relatively less on the far side. This would be the case if you stopped the moon. Tidal forces are also at play when you fall into a black hole and your body is stretched like a rack. If you fall feet first, your feet are pulled relatively stronger then your head, again because of the variation of gravitation with distance (which is not precisely inverse square but rather having a correction factor that Einstein calculated for the precession of the orbit of Mercury).

Randy Muller in a similar vein, I doubted your solar tides being only a fourth of the lunar tides but you are correct. The exact number is 4.139 which ratio of the solar mass to lunar mass times the cube of the ratio of lunar distance to the solar distance. Surprising because the sun is so distant that the difference between the distant of the earth’s near side (day) and far side (night) is so negligible. Trust but verify.

96%!  I should go back to jr. high.  I just missed the question on respiration - do mammals respire anaerobically?

#25 robroy:

“Gravitational pull” would not account for a high tide on the side of the earth opposite the moon.  Wikipedia has a good, if somewhat dense, explanation of tidal physics here.

#26 Scott K.:

Mammals usually respire aerobically (burning oxygen) but, when you work too hard and your muscles can’t get enough oxygen, they switch to anaerobic respiration.  It’s less efficient, and it produces acidic by-products—which is what causes your muscles to be stiff and achy after unusual exertion.

96% - how’s that for a 41yr old southern baptist?

B (84%) - whatever, am I bovvered?

Dear Ross, thanks for the wiki reference. Wikipedia is truly amazing. Asimov got it wrong. Encyclopedia galactica will pale in comparison to wikipedia in a few years. I, of course, derived the equations rather than looking them up.

I visited your website. Enjoyable! Much more creative than I am. Anyway, I quote the wiki article:

“Tidal acceleration does not require rotation or orbiting bodies; e.g. the body may be freefalling in a straight line under the influence of a gravitational field while still being influenced by (changing) tidal acceleration.”

That was the point I was trying to make. Tides don’t have to do with orbiting, per se, but actually you are correct because orbiting is a form of “falling”.

92%

My 8th and 9th grade kids haven’t dared to try yet.  “It’s SUMMER!!!!  We don’t HAFTA know this!!!!”