25% of Americans surveyed are unable to answer correctly that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation. Whereas among the online population, the survey has been conducted by Sagepub and the ratio is reduced to 1 in 25.
NSF conducted this survey in 2012 to 2,200 people in the United States and release in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
The question in the survey was “Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth,” but 26% of surveyed people answered incorrectly.
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that “The universe began with a huge explosion” and only 48 percent said “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”
Here is the catch, though: Americans survey answers are fared better than Europeans who took similar survey questions.
Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy question correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.
In a survey compiled by the National Opinion Research Center from various sources, Americans seemed to generally support science research and expressed the greatest interest in new medical discoveries and local school issues related to science. They were least interested in space exploration, agricultural developments and international and foreign policy issues related to science.
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