Tuesday, August 4, 2009

What is at the center of the Solar System?

Almost 20% of Americans don't know that the earth revolves around the sun. Wow!

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: "As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?" In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn't know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know.


This is astounding to me. read the rest of the article here. And a hat tip to Cool Green Science for the link.

1 comment:

Albert A Rasch said...

You're astounded?

We've been teaching the last couple of generations that every revolves around them, no wonder they're confused...

Albert
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