Wednesday, July 08, 2009

I'm an American, not a scientist

Okay, it would have been better if I could have thought of something that sounded more like--I'm a doctor, not a brick-layer. But I'm not a doctor or a brick-layer, so this will have to do.

Anyway, as I did not do all the cool stuff on the 4th, and in fact I forgot to even go in the backyard to see if the fireworks were visible, I wasn't doing much that I don't normally do. I went to my brother's place where we had some hotdogs and hamburgers, and we ended up talking about dumb stuff for a couple of hours, and then we went home.

And then it was the usual stuff that I do around here, watching TV and playing around on the computer, minus stuff like trying to get any work done.

And I read a couple of the news stories that pop up when I go to read my email. And while I was doing that, I was invited to take a few quizzes.

So I thought that I would see how I'd do taking the citizenship test. Only, it wasn't really the citizenship test, cause the real test is longer and doesn't help you out with multiple choice answers, but those are easier to do for the purpose of taking these little quizzes on the computer.

After that I got some questions on recent news stories concerning space and science. Before I took either quiz I expected to do better with the science quiz than the American citizenship stuff. After all, the American citizenship stuff would have been stuff that I might have studied to take tests back in college twenty years ago, and not stuff that I was really that interested in other than to pass those tests. On the other hand, science stuff in the news tends to get my attention.

On the citizenship test I scored 85%. Welcome to America. You know more about the place than most people who live here.

I get the openings of the different documents backwards. And I got the number of amendments wrong. And I didn't know which one was the chief justice of the supreme court.

But I knew all that other stuff. Or, at least, I thought I knew all that other stuff or I made a good guess.

As for the science quiz, I got a flat zero.

It was all really recent stuff that I either hadn't heard about or couldn't remember. I couldn't remember the name of the recent Mars probe. Other questions didn't seem to be about science at all. One question concerned finding a nude picture of the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was painted by a scientist, but other than that I don't think that the picture itself has anything to do with science.

Still, it was a bit odd. And I guess that some of my college studies stuck with me more than I thought they had.

2 comments:

Ananda girl said...

The only quiz like that that I have done well on is the Are You A Geek? Test. As it turned out, I was indeed a total geek.

dmarks said...

Mentions of nude pictures probably make that quiz popular in searches.