Q 01/05

The SI unit of energy is named after which English physicist?

A) Isaac Newton

B) James Prescott Joule

C) Michael Faraday

D) James Watt

Answer · why

B) James Prescott Joule

One joule is the work done when a force of one newton moves something one metre; a joule of energy will lift a small apple about a metre.

Q 02/05

The term 'horsepower' was adopted in the late 18th century by which engineer to sell his steam engines?

A) George Stephenson

B) Thomas Newcomen

C) James Watt

D) Richard Trevithick

Answer · why

C) James Watt

He needed a figure customers could picture: how many draft horses an engine replaced. One imperial horsepower is about 745.7 watts.

Q 03/05

In which year did Einstein publish the paper establishing mass-energy equivalence, E = mc²?

A) 1905

B) 1911

C) 1915

D) 1921

Answer · why

A) 1905

It was one of his four 'miracle year' papers; the paper actually says a body giving off energy L loses mass L/c², rather than writing the famous formu...

Q 04/05

In which city was Edison's Pearl Street Station, the first US commercial central power plant, opened in 1882?

A) Menlo Park, New Jersey

B) Chicago

C) New York

D) Philadelphia

Answer · why

C) New York

On its first day it powered just 400 lamps for 82 customers in lower Manhattan; two years later it served 508 customers and more than 10,000 lamps.

Q 05/05

The world's first nuclear power plant to feed electricity into a grid, in 1954, was in which country?

A) United States

B) United Kingdom

C) Soviet Union

D) France

Answer · why

C) Soviet Union

Obninsk, about 110 km from Moscow, produced only about 5 megawatts of net electricity, but it ran until 2002.