Science Trivia Quizzes With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about the history of science

Science Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is science?
A: Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

When can the earliest roots of science be traced to in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia?
A: Around 3500 to 3000 BCE.

Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped what?
A: Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to explain events of the physical world based on natural causes.

Disciplines that utilize existing scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine, are described as what?
A: Applied sciences.

Science is based on what?
A: Research, which is commonly conducted in academic and research institutions as well as in government agencies and companies.

The practical impact of scientific research has led to the emergence of science policies that seek to influence the scientific enterprise by prioritizing the development of what?
A: Commercial products, armaments, health care, and environmental protection.

Science in a broad sense existed before the modern era and in many what?
A: Historical civilizations.

Modern science is distinct in its approach and successful in its results, so it now defines what?
A: It defines what science is in the strictest sense of the term.

Science in its original sense was a word for a type of what?
A: A type of knowledge, rather than a specialized word for the pursuit of such knowledge.

In particular, it was what type of knowledge?
A: Knowledge which people can communicate to each other and share.

Knowledge about the working of natural things was gathered long before recorded history and led to what?
A: The development of complex abstract thought.

How is this shown?
A: By the construction of complex calendars, techniques for making poisonous plants edible, public works at national scale, such as reservoirs, dams, and dikes, and buildings such as the Pyramids.

However, no consistent conscious distinction was made between knowledge of such things, which are true in every community, and what?
A: Other types of communal knowledge, such as mythologies and legal systems.

Metallurgy was known in prehistory, and the Vinča culture was the earliest known producer of what?
A: Bronze-like alloys.

It is thought that early experimentation with heating and mixing of substances over time developed into what?
A: Alchemy.

What was found in the royal palace in Mari, Syria?
A: Clay models of animal livers dating between the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE.

The ancient Mesopotamians used knowledge about the properties of various natural chemicals for manufacturing what?
A: Pottery, faience, glass, soap, metals, lime plaster, and waterproofing.

They made extensive records of the movements of astronomical objects for what?
A: Their study of astrology.

The Mesopotamians had intense interest in medicine and the earliest medical prescriptions appear when?
A: During the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BCE – c. 2004 BCE).

The Mesopotamians seem to have had little interest in gathering information about the natural world for the mere sake of gathering information and mainly only studied scientific subjects which had what?
A: Obvious practical applications or immediate relevance to their religious system.

In the classical world, there is no real ancient analog of a what?
A: A modern scientist.

Instead, well-educated, usually upper-class, and almost universally male individuals performed what?
A: Various investigations into nature whenever they could afford the time.

Before the discovery of the concept of "nature" by the Pre-Socratic philosophers, the same words tend to be used to describe the natural "way" in which a plant grows and what?
A: The "way" in which, for example, one tribe worships a particular god.

For this reason, it is claimed these men were the first what?
A: Philosophers in the strict sense, and also the first people to clearly distinguish "nature" and "convention."

The early Greek philosophers of the Milesian school were the first to attempt to explain natural phenomena without relying on what?
A: The supernatural.

The Pythagoreans developed a complex number philosophy and contributed significantly to the development of what?
A: Mathematical science.

The theory of atoms was developed by whom?
A: The Greek philosopher Leucippus and his student Democritus.

The Greek doctor Hippocrates established the tradition of what?
A: Systematic medical science.

He is known as what?
A: "The Father of Medicine".

A turning point in the history of early philosophical science was Socrates' example of applying philosophy to the study of human matters, including what?
A: Human nature, the nature of political communities, and human knowledge itself.

The Socratic Method as documented by Plato's dialogues is a what?
A: Dialectic method of hypothesis elimination: better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions.

This was a reaction to the Sophist emphasis on what?
A: Rhetoric.

The Socratic method searches for what?
A: General, commonly held truths that shape beliefs and scrutinizes them to determine their consistency with other beliefs.

Socrates was, in the words of his Apology, accused of what?
A: Corrupting the youth of Athens because he did "not believe in the gods the state believes in, but in other new spiritual beings".

Socrates refuted these claims, but was what?
A: Sentenced to death.

Medieval science postulated a ventricle of the brain as the location for our what?
A: Common sense where the forms from our sensory systems commingled.

Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period, what took place?
A: An intellectual decline took place in the western part of Europe.

In contrast, the Byzantine Empire resisted the attacks from the barbarians, and did what?
A: Preserved and improved upon the learning.

John Philoponus, a Byzantine scholar in the 500s, was the first scholar ever to question what?
A: Aristotle's teaching of physics and to note its flaws.

John Philoponus' criticism of Aristotelian principles of physics served as an inspiration to whom?
A: Medieval scholars as well as to Galileo Galilei.

Ten centuries later, during the Scientific Revolution, Galilei extensively cited Philoponus in his works while making what case?
A: The case as to why Aristotelian physics was flawed.

During late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, what approach to inquiries on natural phenomena was used?
A: The Aristotelian.

In Classical antiquity, Greek and Roman taboos had meant that dissection was usually what?
A: Banned in ancient times.

In Middle Ages it changed: medical teachers and students at Bologna began to do what?
A: Open human bodies.

Mondino de Luzzi produced the first known what?
A: Anatomy textbook based on human dissection.

By 1088, the first university in Europe (the University of Bologna) had emerged from its clerical beginnings.