Q 01/05

Which cold-weather emergency sets in when the body's core temperature falls below 35 °C?

A) Frostbite

B) Chilblains

C) Hypothermia

D) Trench foot

Answer · why

C) Hypothermia

Hypothermia. Below 35 °C the body is losing heat faster than it can make it, and because the cold also dulls thinking, victims often fail to realise t...

Q 02/05

In Anders Celsius's original 1742 scale, what temperature was 0 degrees?

A) The boiling point of water

B) Human body temperature

C) Absolute zero

D) The freezing point of water

Answer · why

A) The boiling point of water

The boiling point of water. Celsius put freezing at 100, so his thermometer's numbers climbed as the weather got colder; within a few years others had...

Q 03/05

Which Italian scientist is credited with inventing the thermoscope, a forerunner of the thermometer, around 1600?

A) Leonardo da Vinci

B) Galileo Galilei

C) Evangelista Torricelli

D) Alessandro Volta

Answer · why

B) Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei. His glass bulb and tube showed a liquid rising and falling with the temperature, but with no scale it could only show a change, never...

Q 04/05

Which 1740s naturalist had a modern-style Celsius thermometer built for his greenhouses?

A) Comte de Buffon

B) Joseph Banks

C) Alexander von Humboldt

D) Carl Linnaeus

Answer · why

D) Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus. He is often named as the man who gave the scale its modern form, but several scientists and instrument makers adopted it at about the s...

Q 05/05

What was the Celsius scale commonly called in English before 1948?

A) Hectograde

B) Metric degrees

C) Swedish degrees

D) Centigrade

Answer · why

D) Centigrade

Centigrade, meaning a hundred steps. It was renamed after Anders Celsius in 1948, partly because in France the word centigrade was already in use for ...