50/50 in Science VI Trivia Quiz

Answer: False

If you have ever seen a lunar eclipse, then you should have answered this correctly. Even though it is logical that the Moon is invisible during a lunar eclipse, because the Moon is in the Earth's shadow from the Sun, the Moon becoming invisible is not a natural result.

Instead, during totality of the eclipse the Moon appears reddish orange and is clearly seen, due to the presence of the Earth's atmosphere refracting sunlight around.

Answer: False

Formation of mountains is mainly caused by the earth's surface buckling up under tectonic forces. But there are mountains formed from magma upwelling, specifically volcanoes.

Answer: True

Mars's day lasts 24.6 hours, similar to the length of a day on Earth.

Answer: False

Many people are familiar with the three degrees of burn, but there is a fourth-degree burn. A fourth-degree burn is the most severe possible type of burn, which involves burns to muscles, tendons, and bones in addition to skin.

Answer: False

The sky is really purple, but we see the sky as blue because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than purple light.

The blue color of the sky is due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, a process in which the light from the sun spreads around in the atmosphere. Since shorter wavelength (bluer) light is scattered more readily than longer wavelength (redder) light, the blue color of the sky stands out the most. Lord Rayleigh, for whom "Rayleigh scattering" was termed, was the first to determine why the sky is blue, but he thinks that the sky should be violet because violet (not blue) light has the shortest wavelength of the visible spectrum, therefore violet light is scattered most easily, rather than blue light. In fact, the Earth's atmosphere scatters 50 times more violet light than blue light!

More info can be found in http://biocurious.com/2007/05/17/why-isnt-the-sky-purple

Answer: False

Given that the Sun is so incredibly hot, it is surprising that not every element listed on the periodic table would be gaseous. Tungsten and rhenium are the two elements that are not gaseous at the surface temperature of the Sun, although both are pretty close to their boiling points.

Answer: False

Even though it is termed heart, this organ is not shaped like a heart. Heart in this sense means the core, and so heart is termed because it is at the core of the body and forms the body's central life support system.

Answer: True

With much of the surface being covered in dusty deserts, Mars may look warm to many people, but Mars is in fact much colder than Earth. The average surface temperature is about -80°F, compared to around 60°F for Earth. It is much colder because Mars lies further away from the Sun than Earth and its atmosphere is lot thinner, making it less effective in trapping heat.

Answer: True

There are bugs helpful for plants, a process called mutualism. A prominent example is bees carrying pollen from male plant to female plant, producing flowers.

Answer: True

Although nearly everybody is familiar with the word, not as many of us are familiar with this unit. One shake equals one hundred-millionth of a second or 10 nanoseconds. This is not a commonly used unit, but it is often used in circuitry and nuclear physics. In nuclear chain reactions, shake is typically an amount of time between a neutron bombarding the nucleus causing fission that releases more neutrons that would bombard another nuclei.

The term "shake" is originated from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", which itself was invented from the compilation story called "The Ingoldsby Legends", written by Richard Harris Barham.

Answer: False

All the matter we see is made of atoms, but there is matter invisible to us that is not made of atoms. That invisible stuff is called dark matter. In fact, dark matter is five times more common in the universe than visible matter! But maybe there's dark matter made of atoms, called baryonic dark matter. Nonbaryonic dark matter, on the other hand, is not made of atoms but of unknown particles. One candidate particle of nonbaryonic dark matter is WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

There are visible matter in the universe that is not made of atoms. Plasma is the fourth state of matter in which it is made exclusively of ions and electrons. Neutron stars, like plasma, are made of ions, nuclei and subatomic particles but do not form atoms.

Answer: False

The Moon actually has an atmosphere, but we wouldn't notice it as it is more than 100 trillion times thinner than Earth's. Sources of the lunar atmosphere are sputtering effects caused by sunlight, solar wind, micrometeorites hitting the surface, and gases emitted by radioactive elements in the moon rocks.

The most abundant gas in the Moon's atmosphere is argon, amounting to just 40,000 atoms per cubic centimeter.

Answer: False

I always used to think that swamp and marsh were synonyms until I posed this question. Swamp is a forested wetland dominated by trees and mires while marsh is a non-forested wetland dominated by grasses, reeds, rushes, and shrubs.

Answer: False

Understand that inversing the number is not the same as changing the sign in front of the number. Inversing the number, or more familiarly its reciprocal, is obtained by dividing 1 by a number that it is inversing to. Examples: the reciprocal of 2 is 0.5 since 1/2=0.5, the reciprocal of 0.25 is 4 since 1/0.25=4.

Answer: True

In chemistry, polar means atoms in the molecule share electrons unequally relative to one another, thereby producing partial positive charge on one atom and partial negative charge on one another. Water is polar as hydrogen has a slight positive charge and oxygen has a slight negative charge.

The polarity of a water molecule is what give it its high melting and boiling points compared to its constituent atoms, as well as its high solubility.