Americans have big gaps in their knowledge of science

Rob Quinn

Newser Staff

Updated Sept. 11, 2015, 11:17 a.m. ET

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe's most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104). The galaxy's hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane.

(NEWSER) – Most Americans have a good grasp of some areas of scientific knowledge but are relatively clueless on others, according to Pew Research Center analysis based on a quiz that you may wish to try out here before reading on—and if you get a perfect score, congratulate yourself on being among the top 6% in the country. Out of the 12 multiple-choice questions that Pew describes as representing a "small slice of scientific knowledge," the 3,278 randomly selected adults found one on the Earth's layers the easiest, with 86% correctly naming the core as the hottest. Only 34%, however, knew that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes, and only 35% knew that the height, or amplitude, of a sound wave determines its loudness.

The average number of questions answered correctly was eight, though this tended to go up with the respondent's education level. Pew says that men tended to get higher scores than women, white people tended to score higher than other groups, and younger adults tended to do better than those over 65—but while under-30s were more likely to identify radio waves as the waves that transmit cellphone calls, fewer of the under-65s were able to identify Jonas Salk as the developer of the polio vaccine. Overall, the findings amount to a "D" in science for the nation, decides Karen Kaplan at the Los Angeles Times, who notes that a disappointing 22% of respondents mixed up astrology and astronomy.

This article originally appeared on Newser:

Only 6% of Americans Had Perfect Scores in This Quiz on Basic Scientific Knowledge