The science round is where general quizzes reveal their setters. A round
written by someone comfortable with the subject asks about mechanisms; one
written by someone who is not asks about names, units and firsts. The second
kind is far more common, which is good news, because names, units and firsts are
finite.
The reliable core
Roughly in order of how often it is asked: the periodic table (symbols,
atomic numbers, who is named after what), human anatomy at the level of "which
organ does X", SI units and who they are named for, the planets and their
moons, the classification of animals, and the standard set of scientific
firsts — the electron, penicillin, the structure of DNA, the double helix, the
first vaccine.
Discovery questions are the ones to prioritise, because they carry three
askable facts each: what, who, and when.
Penicillin is Fleming, 1928, and
a contaminated plate; the double helix
is Watson, Crick, Franklin and 1953;
X-rays are Röntgen and his wife's
hand. A setter can build three different questions from each, and does.
The ones that are really history
A surprising share of science questions are not about science at all. They
are about the circumstances: the
radium girls,
the doctor who drank the bacteria to
prove a point,
the obituary that created the Nobel
Prize, the Hubble's misground mirror,
and the eclipse that made Einstein
famous. If you find the chemistry heavy going, these are the same marks by
another route.
The periodic table has enough questions to itself to warrant
its own page.
Only two liquid elements at room temperature?
Answer Mercury and bromine
Largest planet?
Answer Jupiter
Which is the largest internal organ of the human body?
Answer The liver
Hottest planet?
Answer Venus (runaway greenhouse effect)
Who published the "Principia" in 1687, setting out three laws of motion?
Answer Isaac Newton
The four blood groups?
Answer A, B, AB, O
Only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences?
Answer Marie Curie (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911)
First element on the periodic table?
Answer Hydrogen (H, atomic number 1)
Which protein makes up hair, nails and the outer layer of skin?
Answer Keratin
Largest organ of the body?
Answer Skin (largest internal: liver)
Most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere?
Answer Nitrogen (~78%)
Which gas do plants take in for photosynthesis and animals breathe out?
Answer Carbon dioxide
E = mc² — whose equation?
Answer Albert Einstein (special relativity, 1905)
Chemical symbol for Carbon?
Answer C
Which organelle is called the powerhouse of the cell?
Answer The mitochondrion
Largest bone?
Answer Femur (thigh)
What is the time for half the atoms in a radioactive sample to decay called?
Answer The half-life
Which moon of Saturn is the only one with a thick atmosphere?
Answer Titan
First person to walk on the Moon, and the mission?
Answer Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 (1969)
Which subatomic particle did J. J. Thomson discover in 1897?
Answer The electron
Who is said to have leapt from his bath shouting "Eureka!"?
Answer Archimedes
Whose 1859 book "On the Origin of Species" set out evolution by natural selection?
Answer Charles Darwin
Which force did Einstein reinterpret as the curvature of spacetime?
Answer Gravity
Which quantity, symbol S, measures disorder and never decreases in an isolated system?
Answer Entropy
Which 1947 Bell Labs invention replaced the vacuum tube and made modern computing possible?
Answer The transistor
What name is given to a whole number greater than 1 divisible only by itself and 1?
Answer A prime number
Which gland is called the master gland, controlling the others?
Answer The pituitary
Who developed the germ theory of disease and a rabies vaccine?
Answer Louis Pasteur
What is a large molecule built from repeating units called?
Answer A polymer
Which gland in the neck produces thyroxine and needs iodine to do it?
Answer The thyroid