Three Questions

I found an interesting survey conducted by the California Academy for Sciences.

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 don’t know what significance can be attached to the results reproduced above. People are busy trying to stay whole in a universe that sometimes seems bent on destroying them.If you asked me three science questions there’s a good chance I might not know all three. Maybe the point they were trying to make is that in a world coming to be dominated by science, we need to do a better job teaching science.

Here are the answers I found with a little research.

The Earth takes 365.25 days to revolve once around the Sun, the extra quarter of a day is dealt with every fours years by adding a day to February—leap year. I wonder if you had to know about the quarter of a day to get the answer right?

Humans came along around 65 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The extinction event is believed to have been caused by the impact of an asteroid six miles across in the vicinity of the Mexican Yucatan peninsula.

The Earth’s oceans cover approximately 75 percent of the Earth’s surface. We are really a water planet.