None of the above
As background for an article complaining about falling standards in education, The Times scanned and posted the 2006 Edexcel GCSE Science: Physics P1b exam paper. This is a multiple choice paper covering topics of waves, electromagnetic radiation, astronomy, cosmology, and seismology.
I don’t necessarily concur with the judgment of the article ( ( Read more... )
8) I wouldn't be surprised if microwaves can also cause skin cancer (and certainly they can damage eyes, as can be shown in a simple experiment involving a mammalian eye from the butcher's and a microwave oven, sure to delight children of many ages).
10) I'm not sure that there's *no* Jovian environment which would support some approximately Earth-like life. It's a big place.
Having steeled myself to click on the actual link, I would also note:
questions 6 and 7 are both entirely bogus.
A is a legitimate answer to 12.
Question 27 has no correct answer. (A) is the closest to correct, although the answer they want is (C). (C) is true, but doesn't answer the question.
There are lots of minor quibbles.
Several of the questions are of the form "is 2+2 equal to (A) 3, (B) 4, (C) 5, (D) 6", and have essentially no physics content.
And question 33 is also treading on iffy ground, given the confusing status of 'dark energy'. A much harder question than the others, and one which we don't actually know the answer to at the moment.
But question 30 is unspeakable. My God. Nobody who knows any physics can have written this question. Not even an interested ten-year-old could have written this question. Which raises the obvious point: what qualifications are required to write a GCSE examination paper?
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questions 6 and 7 are both entirely bogus.
Some of the commenters on the Times article wondered if this was part of a programme of indoctrination: teach children about iris scanning, then when they grow up they will be less likely to object to it.
Question 33 is problematic, because (as I understand it) the proportions of baryonic matter, non-baryonic (dark) matter, and dark energy are now highly constrained by models of the Big Bang. This 1995 paper sets out the theory; on Wikipedia, see Lambda-CDM model. So it may not be a question of finding more or less dark matter, the CMBR and other observations already constrain the amount (if the model is right).
But schools can't possibly be expected to grapple with this in any detail. And the idea that the fate of the universe is tied to the density parameter is still a valid concept, and a good thing to be learning about, I think. So three cheers for putting cosmology on the GCSE syllabus, but boo to Edexcel for being too incurious to learn anything about it.
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I guess my point here is that there are actual deployed systems which do identification based on irises, retinas, faces (of which eyebrows are an important part) and I dare say on scleral blood-vessel patterns. And these actual deployed systems are used in a variety of settings including airports but also including offices and military bases, and probably also including hospitals, schools, offices, homes, vehicles, and examination board arse-finding competitions.
So this is ignorant, as well as being indoctrination. And it also has absolutely fuck-all to do with physics. Really, nothing at all. It has a little tiny bit to do with biology, I guess, and maybe a bit to do with IT, and a lot to do with sociology, and politics, and history, and philosophy, and "citizenship". But not physics. So what the hell is it doing in a physics paper? I mean, where are the questions about reality TV, or gardening, or french poetry?
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"It's a roll-over".
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There is a written paper, right?
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Was our galaxy ever called a nebula? Certainly some other galaxies were called nebulae, such as the Andromeda Nebula. But ours was surely always the "Milky Way" or "the Galaxy".
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