Plan B Forum

Nitpicky Test

I got 21, but technically I got less because some were guesses.

You misspelled the thread title. Do I win?

Not really. That means your a looser

23, but like you I guessed a few times.

I got a 22, also including some guesses...(it rapidly became apparent that the answer giving the most commonly held belief was always wrong, so that improved the guessing odds)

18 out of 30.  I wasn't as good at guessing as Joe or Jim.

And a couple of those questions were pretty nit-picky.  The earth and the sun orbit the center of the mass of both?  The mass of earth is 5.972 × 10^24 kg (that's 5,972 with 21 zeroes after it); mass of the sun is 1.989 × 10^30 kg (1,989 with 27 zeroes after it).  That's something like ONE MILLION TIMES MORE MASSIVE than the Earth, so if the center of the combined mass isn't the center of the sun it's gotta be so damned close as to make no significant difference.

-"BB"-

Hence pedantry

But if it is about pendants, then you should go for the low hanging fruit.

Hence, the thread title...

27 for Cliff Clavin

Why am I not surprised?

MajGenl.Meade wrote:27 for Cliff Clavin

Don't you want to quibble about the three you missed?

"Ya see, LJ. I didn't miss them but I don't like to boast so...."

24/30...and most of my guesses were wrong.

The one Bill was nitpicking about I did get right (because I saw what they were probably trying to get at)...but I agree that if the center of mass is somewhere INSIDE the sun, and if that point is what the earth orbits, then it's TRUE to say that the earth orbits the sun (since what we call "the sun" is not a point but rather a spheroid with a volume that consists of a large number of points, including the point that is the center of mass of the earth-sun system). It would be false to say that the earth orbits a point at the exact center of the sun.

Well, I really wanted to pick on that question. Didn't it ask if the earth rotated around the sun?

Surely the correct answer is that it rotates about its own axis? It "orbits" the sun.

22/30. I got lucky on a couple of them, and blew the rest.

Meade - Nope. The exact wording of the question was "True or false: Earth revolves around the sun." (I went back through the quiz and looked to make sure.)

Econoline wrote:Meade - Nope. The exact wording of the question was "True or false: Earth revolves around the sun." (I went back through the quiz and looked to make sure.)

You are correct. I wasn't pendanting about the answer "False" but the reason they gave. Which as it turns out is correct after all.

I only went for false because it's the same thing in one definition of the word "revolve". It revolves around its axis. But then it turns out to also be pretty much what they gave as the rationale (although I think they stated it incorrectly, no?):

But the Earth does not revolve around the Sun. At least, not exactly. Time to get pedantic.

"Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system," writes Cathy Jordan, a Cornell University Ask an Astronomer contributor. "The center of mass of our solar system very close to the Sun itself, but not exactly at the Sun's center."

24 .

They've got one question wrong, Leif Ericson was not European, he was an Icelander, the concept of Europe did not extend as far as Iceland in the first century.

You scored
26 out of 30