What property of light waves can be observed as light waves pass from one medium to another and change speed?

The additional remark “and change speed” is significant, and indicates the correct answer is “refraction”.

I note they still include the odd question and figure about when the Earth has equal day and night, with the same figure. Overall, there’s better writing, but I did note:

25. A red ball weighs more than a blue ball. This requires that —
A the red ball is larger than the blue ball
B in direct sunlight the red ball is larger than the blue ball
≥C Earth’s gravitational pull on the red ball is greater than on the blue ball
D Earth’s gravitational pull on the blue ball is greater than on the red ball

The wording is unclear. The “Earth’s gravitational pull” typically means the acceleration field, i.e. the g. But that is incorrect for this question. The intent they seem to have for the phrase is that the object is pulled harder – but that’s just another way to say the red ball is heavier, i.e. weighs more. That just restates the question. The answer they were looking for is something about the relative masses of the two balls, vs. the sizes of the balls.

30. Wind occurs when air masses move from one place to
another. What causes the movement of air masses?
A The position of the moon
≥B The heating of the air
C The rotation of Earth
D The condensation of air

What about the Jet Stream? Aren’t major wind patterns caused by Earth’s rotation?

Dean, it also wasn’t readily apparent to me why B was correct for the Orion question, but with a little thought after the fact it makes sense.

Magnum, regarding the rotation rates of Mercury and Venus, the difference is the difference between rotation to starfield and Sun-respective rotation. The starfield rotations of Mercury and Venus are ~58.6 days and ~-243 days. The Sun respective rotations (i.e. noon to noon) are ~176 vs ~117 days. The difference is the motion around the Sun itself, changing the orientation of noon to the starfield. See http://www.mira.org/fts0/planets/092/text/txt001x.htm .

Anyway, that Mercury/Venus one is still a kicker. Luckily it was not on the actual ISAT. Nor was that lightspeed solar wind blooper. Nor the aurora booboo you cited in the original post, or the Black Jupiter question.

It did, however, include a dubious physics item that had two correct answers. The item asked what could be observed when light passes from one medium to another. Refraction is the best answer, but reflection can also be observed in such a case (that’s why you can see yourself in a window). The question would have been better if reflection had not been an option.

Writing really good multiple choice items is a non-trivial task.

In Illinois, the constellation Orion can be seen in the night sky in winter. Why can this constellation not be seen in the summer?
A Earth is tilted away from the constellation.
B Earth orbits to the other side of the sun.
C Brighter constellations block Orion from view in the Northern Hemisphere.
D The orbit of the moon blocks Orion from view in the Northern Hemisphere.

If you answered A, take a giant step backwards because you got it wrong!

Let’s apply some skeptical sleuthing to this document before we get too engaged in the feeding frenzy of content criticism. Don’t be Dan Rather-credulous!

The Illinois State Board of Education has published its released test questions on its website. These are not those questions.

The document whose items are being criticised here appears to be a practice test cobbled together at an Illinois school district (Oconee County). The sources are kindly listed (New York’s Regents Exam, Scott-Foresman Publishing, etc.). My guess is that this document was prepared for internal use only. You can’t get at it from the front end.

So dig in a criticize the items; it’s good fun (and some of them are real dogs). But don’t blame the great state of Illinois for using them to abuse its 7th-graders.

I don’t know what the test is supposed actually to test, besides some rigid, rote learning program. Also, a few of the questions are quite badly phrased.

If this is a test that is really given to year 7 kids somewhere, and it can properly grade the students (i.e. it’s at the right level so 99% of students don’t bomb, or 99% don’t blitz it, but there’s a good range of results), then I’m impressed. It’s not an easy test.

FT with the arrow over it = the vector Force of the Tides
G = Gravitational constant
MMoon = mass of Moon
Rhat = the vector distance between the Moon cg and the location on Earth being considered
Dhat = the vector closest distance between the Earth and Moon
R = magnitute of Rhat
D = magnitude of Dhat
yhat appears to equal the vector offset for the location being measured from the line between the centers of mass of the Earth and Moon.

Amanda said:
> Generally, if it’s any kind of standardized, there’s a way to crack it without actually knowing the material.

I had a college geography class that was very difficult to “crack”. The teacher killed a couple of the standard elimination techniques students use on multiple choice questions by including about 8 or 10 options for every question. Not only A, B, C, or D, but also options for A and B, A and C, B and C, B and D, and A, B, and D – for every question. You couldn’t just assume that because it included multiple options it must be one of the multiple options. You couldn’t very well use partial knowledge to eliminate from one or two multiple options. Her fill in the blank section had an options list with more options than questions to answer. So even if you eliminated all the ones you knew, you still had several answers to pick from on the ones you had to guess.

*Awards John Oliver a gold star*

Many of these questions appear to me to require memorization of facts, sometimes obscure facts. I doubt that many college astronomy majors could take their knowledge of the periods of rotaion and orbital motion of the planets to correctly come up with the solar day values as required by this question.

*sigh* Sadly, most tests in all subjects are worded poorly and full of horrendous diagrams and easy to figure out patterns. Generally, if it’s any kind of standardized, there’s a way to crack it without actually knowing the material.

Ok – I buy that – I had actually misread “auroras” as “aurora” anyway. I agree your construct is best. Since BA didn’t specify which specific “horrific grammer error”, he is now free to choose the one you point out

Personally, I also disagree with the comma-and, but that is a foible and a quibble.

Jack

And before anyone asks, no I wasn’t an English major in college- just a person who had a lot of English (Americanized, of course) grammar pounded into him in high school.

Many of the questions do not require actual astronomy knowledge or recall of the details from class, but merely good test taking deduction skills. A person could easily get a B on the test just by applying some sorting. For instance:

The question about relative distance from the Sun.

Study the diagram below. Then choose the statement that is true.

A) Neptune is twice as far from Pluto as from Earth.
B) Jupiter is about halfway between the sun and Pluto.
C) The outer planets are Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Mars.
D) The inner planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Okay, I didn’t paste the diagram. Still, A) is obviously incorrect. From the diagram, B) is obviously incorrect. C) lists Mars as an outer planet – no way. That leaves D) as the only answer. So it does not matter if there’s no reason why Jupiter is not considered an inner planet, there’s only one possible correct answer.

Others only need a general recall of the topic, not exact knowledge.

For example, the question on page 6 about the layers of the Sun.

What is the order of the Sun’s layers from the inside out?

A) core–radiative and convective zones –chromosphere–corona–photosphere
B) chromosphere–core–radiative and convective zones–corona–photosphere
C) core-radiative and convective zones–corona–photosphere–chromosphere
D) core-radiative and convective zones–photosphere–chromosphere–corona

Now I don’t recall studying this and don’t know offhand the correct answer, but I know the core is innermost and corona is outermost. There’s only one answer with those two criteria met – D). So I don’t need to know anything about the radiative and convective zones or the photosphere and chromosphere.

Similarly, if I know that the root “photo” applies to light, then that is all I need to answer

Which layer of the sun’s atmosphere is the bright layer that is visible to us?

A. photosphere
B. radiation zone
C. convection zone
D. core

I deduce that the visible layer is the layer that has the Latin word for light in it. Now if they had listed the chromosphere, I might have had a harder time, since chromo means color.

crster, for question 1, I also wondered why Jupiter was solid black. I also wonder why they used real planet names in the wrong order rather than using fictional planet names – Marduk, Vulcan, Diskworld, Planet X. That would eliminate confusion. But the question does explicitly state to use the diagram given, so if limiting to the information in the diagram, the actual planet order is irrelevant, and any knowledge of Jupiter’s interior processes is irrelevant.

You are correct about the “eccentricity” question. It appears they are using “eccentricity” to refer to the inclination rather than the ellipticality.

The Sun formation question was really weird. That one does not make much sense. There’s no connection between the answer and the question.

Michael H, the term “friction” is used in the broad sense. Compressive heating due to velocity melts the leading edge, which is removed through drag to pull the liquid off, exposing more object to the compressive heating. It’s friction dragging the layers off to keep it eroding away.

The question that the Freakonomics guy had trouble with also bothered me. The Earth doesn’t have any axial tilt in the diagram, which is why June 21st has to be specified. I’m sitting here trying to figure out why the south pole goes over the Sun, before I finally work out what they mean. Stupid 2-D representations!

Eric Said:
> Why exactly does the solar wind not qualify as star particles in outer space?

The question you refer to is the aurora question? Star particles is being differentiated from Sun particles. Yes, we know the Sun is a star, but it has a special privilege with respect to the Solar System and is thus distinct for the purposes of this test.

Here’s one that really bugged me:

5. Gravity alone holds us to the Earth’s surface and explains the phenomena of the tides.

While technically true, it is misleading. Tides are not directly caused by gravity the same way gravity pulls us to the surface. Rather, tides are caused by the differential pulling of gravity – pulling one part more than another part. So how is this shown in the questions about tides?

Tides are caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon and the Sun acting upon the Earth.
Which diagram below represents the positions of the Sun, Moon, and Earth that would result in the highest tide?

There are three essentially the same figures of a triangular arrangement of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, and there is one that has them in a line. Ergo the correct answer is that one. But the question still presents the misleading implication that the tides are caused by direct pulling, not differential pulling.

Then there’s this one:

Based on the above diagram, how would the tides be affected on Earth?

A. High tides are higher, low tides are lower than normal
B. No change
C. High tides are lower, low tides are higher than normal
D. Expect tidal waves

The diagram has the Moon 90deg out from the Sun. Okay, define “normal”.

Then there’s this:

The sun is the most massive object in our solar system. If the sun were not present, what would happen to the planets in the solar system?

A. Their momentum would keep them going in their same orbits.
B. Their inertia would send them in a straight line out into space.
C. The orbits would collapse into the area where the sun once was.
D. They would explode.

If the Sun were not present, the planets would not have formed in the first place, so none of the above.

Some tests I’ve seen and books by school systems are very bad saying that solar prominences are the “flames that give us our heat and light”, “astronaughts” (sic) are weightless because they are beyond the reach of gravity and so many more. We even had the local school system buy EVERY school a basic bare bones 6″ Dobsonian scope and tell us to educate the teachers on how to find planets, stars, galaxies nebula and other faint fuzzies in the DAYTIME skies. The teachers couldn’t be expected to work at night so had to do this in the day. Oh yes, every time she referred to the Dobs the head of science for the school system called them microscopes! And we were incompetent because we couldn’t show the teachers how to find M42 at 4 in the afternoon in the spring. She’d checked a planetarium program and knew it was up. Oh yes, never point a “microscope” at the sun was the mantra so therefore daytime solar viewing was not allowed. It would have been easy to fit the scopes with permanent solar filters so they could at least be used but that was too dangerous. For several years now, they’ve sat unused because they can’t be used without a teacher present and the teacher can’t work at night. When the bosses are this dumb its a wonder the kids learn anything.

Yes there are excellent astronomy teachers out there, unfortunately not enough of them.

I tried the test and was going well until I struck the non-existant diagrams. Yes I know they may be available in MS Word or whatever, but I don’t and won’t install it.

So I lost interest in the test, and I guess I failed. Does that mean I have to repeat Grade 7?

Ivan.

The retrograde motion of Venus does make the sidereal day there longer than a solar day.