Science!
Kottke writes:
The results of a survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences reveals that Americans don’t know a whole lot about science.
- Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
- Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
- Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.*
- Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.I think this is even more depressing than the headline and summary make it out to be, because questions about the basic makeup of the world we live in shouldn’t even be considered “matters of science”. When a question is put that way, many adults will simply say they’re “not good with science.” But given the simplicity of the above questions, that’s similar to pulling the “not good at math” card to justify not knowing how to count upwards of twenty.
My American housemate says that he thinks this is false.
