Cookies policy



Schools and universities



15 June 2011

A question of science 2011

Think you know your entropy from your emmetropy? Then try this quiz, which was presented by New Scientist at the Cheltenham Science Festival. Answers at the end

Round 1: Information overload

Q1 The term for a basic unit of information, the bit, was coined by Claude Shannon in 1948. It is a contraction of what phrase?
a) basic iteration
b) binary information
c) binary digit
d) binary unit

Q2 Eight bits make up one standard byte, spelled with a “y” to make it look more computery. What term (also featuring a computery “y”) is sometimes used for four bits, or half a byte?
a) by
b) nybble
c) morsyl
d) mouthfyl

Q3 Unsurprisingly, the quantum unit of information is more ambiguous than the classical bit, encompassing not only definite ones and zeros but all possible superpositions in between. Its name is phonetically identical to:
a) an ancient Roman unit of weight
b) an ancient Babylonian unit of time
c) an ancient Assyrian unit of fluid volume
d) an ancient Egyptian unit of distance


Q4 What thermodynamic quantity is proportional to the logarithm of the number of possible arrangements of the interior state of a system, and so can be thought of as measuring an absence of information, or the logarithm of ignorance?
a) energy
b) enthalpy
c) emmetropy
d) entropy

Round 2: Name that moon

Q5 Named after a character in Shakespeare, the innermost of the five major moons of Uranus is approximately 470 kilometres across and bears a tortured surface showing signs of intense ancient geological activity. It shares its name with an ill-fated planet in the science fiction film Serenity. It is called:
a) Oberon
b) Ariel
c) Umbriel
d) Miranda

Q6 In 1993, astronomers discovered a moon orbiting the asteroid Ida, the first satellite of its kind. It shares its name with which meter of poetic rhythm?
a) anapest
b) bacchius
c) cretic
d) dactyl

Q7 Pluto’s large moon, Charon, was briefly considered for planetary status in 2006, before Pluto itself was relegated to dwarf planet. Pluto is now known to have two much smaller moons, discovered in 2005 by the Hubble Space Telescope. They are:
a) Cheryl and Tracey
b) Hydra and Nix
c) Stygia and Acheron
d) Cerberus and Persephone

Q8 Rhea is the second largest of Saturn’s many moons. What is unique about it?
a) It’s the largest irregularly shaped moon in the solar system
b) It’s the only moon in the solar system that astronomers think may have its own moon
c) It bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star before Luke Skywalker blew it up
d) It was the first moon to be discovered by an interplanetary spacecraft

Round 3: Alphabet of science

Q9 Which upper-case letter, when placed underneath a small circle, represents a distance of one hundred-thousandth of one hundred-thousandth of a metre?
a) A
b) B
c) C
d) D

Q10 In cosmology, which lower-case letter represents the dimensionless scale factor of the universe, which measures the expansion of space?
a) c
b) a
c) d
d) b

Q11 ABCD together have many uses in science and medicine. Which of these is genuine?
a) ABCD – a computing acronym to do with processing
b) The ABCD score – a mnemonic to help assess the risk of someone having a stroke
c) ABCD syndrome – a rare multiple personality disorder
d) All of the above

Q12 Which two of the first four letters from the Hebrew alefbet (as it is called) are used in mathematics to represent the size of infinite sets?
a) beth and ghimel
b) ghimel and dalet
c) dalet and aleph
d) aleph and beth

Round 4: Alcohol

Q13 There is alcohol and there is alcohol. Which of these alcohols is the least toxic, and is the one that makes up the main psychoactive agent in wine and beer?
a) methanol
b) ethanol
c) geraniol
d) volemitol

Q14 Strong alcoholic drinks are made by distillation. A mixture of alcohol and water – or indeed any mixture of two different liquids – that cannot be made any stronger by further distillation is called:
a) an azeotrope
b) an oxytrope
c) a unitrope
d) a zoetrope

Q15 What is the highest strength by volume that can be achieved by distillation of an alcoholic drink?
a) 42 per cent
b) 64 per cent
c) 88 per cent
d) 96 per cent

Q16 Where in 1995 did scientists report finding a natural reservoir of alcohol, enough to make “400 trillion trillion pints of beer”?
a) drifting in an interstellar gas cloud thousands of light years from Earth
b) as a frozen lake on the surface of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan
c) in sediments beneath the protected Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio
d) slowly fermenting beneath ice in the peat bogs of Siberia

Round 5: Let there be light

Q17 Why did Isaac Newton divide the visible spectrum into seven colours?
a) Our eyes trick us into seeing the continuous spectrum as having these bands of colour
b) Imperfections in Newton’s prisms meant these parts of the spectrum showed up strongest
c) Long before Newton it was common knowledge that there were seven colours in a rainbow and this coloured his observations of refracted light
d) He believed there must be a connection between colours, musical notes and the known objects of the solar system

Q18 The spectrum of light from our sun peaks at a wavelength of approximately 500 nanometres. The human visual system will usually perceive light of that wavelength as what colour?
a) red
b) orange
c) yellow
d) green

Q19 A type of street lamp, popular for decades, emits lurid yellow light at sharp wavelengths of 589 and 589.6 nanometres. These are the electromagnetic emissions caused by the vaporisation of which element?
a) neon
b) technetium
c) sodium
d) magnesium

Q20 Which of these celestial bodies has the brightest surface daylight?
a) Earth
b) Venus
c) Mars
d) The moon

Round 6: This round is square

Q21 Suppose a town has one and only one male barber who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber? The mathematician who discovered this paradox was:
a) Kurt Gödel
b) David Hilbert
c) Bertrand Russell
d) Sweeney Todd

Q22 What name is given to the following paradox, also known as the night sky paradox: if the universe is infinite, static, eternal and filled with stars, why is the night sky black?
a) Olbers’s paradox
b) Newton’s paradox
c) Poincaré’s paradox
d) Dunkel’s paradox

Q23 Many scientists think that alien civilisations are highly likely to have arisen somewhere in the universe, and yet we haven’t seen any sign of them. This paradox is named after which physicist?
a) Richard Feynman
b) Freeman Dyson
c) Stephen Hawking
d) Enrico Fermi

Q24 In 1997, three theoretical physicists made a bet on the solution of the so-called black hole information paradox. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne bet that all the information contained in an object falling into a black hole would be destroyed. John Preskill bet that it would not. In 2004, Hawking conceded the bet and gave Preskill:
a) an Einstein-shaped pencil eraser
b) a hole in his pocket
c) an encyclopedia of baseball
d) a crate of Guinness

Round 7: Biggish bangs

Q25 A tonne of TNT releases approximately how much energy when it explodes?
a) 4 kilojoules
b) 4 megajoules
c) 4 gigajoules
d) 4 petajoules

Q26 What was the approximate radius of the asteroid or comet that struck what is now the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago, almost certainly wiping out the dinosaurs?
a) 6 kilometres
b) 60 kilometres
c) 600 kilometres
d) 6000 kilometres

Q27 In an ordinary astronomical nova (of the non-super variety), the surface layer of a star explodes in a runaway thermonuclear reaction. What type of star can go nova?
a) white dwarf
b) red giant
c) green giant
d) red dwarf

Q28 To qualify as super, a nova has to be powerful enough to destroy the star. Which of the following is not a recognised mechanism for powering a supernova?
a) the creation of matter and antimatter out of light
b) the collapse of the stellar core into a neutron star
c) runaway nuclear fission reaction
d) runaway thermonuclear reaction

Round 8: Fluffy animals

Q29 To briefly revisit the topic of paradoxes, which of these furry creatures is a vegetarian carnivore?
a) grey seal
b) giant panda
b) two-toed sloth
c) capybara

Q30 The monotremes are an order of mammals indigenous to Australia and New Guinea that sensibly lay eggs rather than go through the trauma of childbirth. How many living species are there?
a) 2
b) 5
c) approximately 250
d) at least 1000

Q31 What is the name of the endangered Madagascan primate which taps on trees and extracts grubs from inside them using a highly elongated middle finger?
a) nay-nay
b) aye-aye
c) oh-oh
d) ah-ah

Q32 Which of the following is not a genus identified in the Burgess Shale, the famous deposit in British Columbia, Canada, that contains soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian period?
a) Hallucigenia
b) Wiwaxia
c) Anomalocaris
d) Xenomorpha


Round 1

Q1: c. Q2: b. Q3: d (the qubit, pronounced like cubit. Various cubits were used throughout the ancient world but the earliest on record is the Egyptian royal cubit). Q4: d.

Round 2

Q5: d (Uranus’s five major moons are Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. Ariel and Umbriel are named after characters in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock; the others are Shakespearean). Q6: d. Q7: b. Q8: b.

Round 3

Q9: a (One angstrom, Å, equals 10-10 metres. Named after spectroscopist Anders Ångström, who used it as a unit of wavelength, it is also a convenient size for measuring chemical bonds). Q10: b. Q11: b. Q12: d.

Round 4

Q13: b. Q14: a. Q15: d. Q16: a.

Round 5

Q17: d. Q18: d (plants are green because chlorophyll doesn’t absorb green light, making them strangely wasteful). Q19: c. Q20: d.

Round 6

Q21: c. Q22: a (the paradox is named after German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, although he was probably not the first to propose it. It is no longer considered paradoxical as in modern cosmology the observable universe is not infinite). Q23: d. Q24: c (At Preskill’s request, it was Total Baseball: The ultimate baseball encyclopedia).

Round 7

Q25: c. Q26: a. Q27: a. Q28: c.

Round 8

Q29: b (it eats mainly bamboo but is a member of the mammalian order Carnivora). Q30: b. Q31: b. Q32: d.