Q 01/05

What is the chemical symbol for gold?

A) Go

B) Au

C) Gd

D) Ag

Answer · why

B) Au

Au comes from the Latin 'aurum'; gold is so unreactive that it is one of the few metals found in nature as nuggets of pure metal.

Q 02/05

Which planet in our Solar System is less dense than water?

A) Jupiter

B) Neptune

C) Uranus

D) Saturn

Answer · why

D) Saturn

Saturn has a mean density of about 0.69 g/cm³, the only planet below water's 1 g/cm³, so it would float in a large enough ocean; Jupiter is roughly tw...

Q 03/05

Which organelle is nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell'?

A) Mitochondria

B) Nucleus

C) Ribosome

D) Endoplasmic reticulum

Answer · why

A) Mitochondria

Mitochondria carry their own small genome because they descend from free-living bacteria that fused with an ancient cell; Philip Siekevitz popularised...

Q 04/05

About how fast does light travel through a vacuum?

A) About 3,000 km/s

B) About 30,000 km/s

C) About 300,000 km/s

D) About 3,000,000 km/s

Answer · why

C) About 300,000 km/s

About 300,000 km/s, so a laser pulse bounced off mirrors that Apollo astronauts left on the Moon comes back in about 2.5 seconds.

Q 05/05

Which physicist imagined a cat that is both alive and dead inside a sealed box?

A) Werner Heisenberg

B) Erwin Schrödinger

C) Niels Bohr

D) Max Planck

Answer · why

B) Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger devised the cat in 1935, not as a real experiment but to show how strange quantum rules look when applied to something as big as a c...