See How Your Science-Savvy Stacks Up

July 10, 3:57 PMDC Science News ExaminerRachel Kaufman

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The Pew Research Center polled over a thousand randomly sampled adults to test their science literacy. The findings show that the public's knowledge of science issues that get more play in the media is slightly better than Americans' understanding of the sort of science that would be taught in high school.

Fewer than half of the respondents could correctly identify how lasers worked (in a true/false question format) and more than half incorrectly identified the size of electrons relative to atoms.

The best informed about science, according to this quiz, are those aged 30 to 49; however, in a departure from knowledge surveys in other areas, those younger than 30 scored higher than the respondents aged 65 or older.

"Previous Pew Research Center knowledge surveys have shown that young people are poorly informed about current events and politics. But this is not the case with science knowledge," says the report.

If you'd like to try the quiz for yourself, click here BEFORE reading the full report, which gives away the answers.