I'm not kidding. I wish this were just an Onion piece. But it's not.
Americans are enthusiastic about the promise of science but lack basic knowledge of it, with one in four unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun, said a poll out Friday.
The survey included more than 2,200 people in the United States and was conducted by the National Science Foundation.
Nine questions about physical and biological science were on the quiz, and the average score -- 6.5 correct -- was barely a passing grade.
Just 74 percent of respondents knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun, according to the results released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Fewer than half (48 percent) knew that human beings evolved from earlier species of animals.
The NSF hasn't yet provided the cross-tabs of the survey, breaking it down by age, race, gender, region, political affiliation, etc. I'd love to see those, though I think we all can make some pretty educated guesses about which subgroups are the most ignorant.
That being said, it does NOT mean, as several outlets are reporting, that 25% or 26% think the Sun revolves around the Earth. We don't yet know exactly how they phrased the question. Maybe most of that 26% gave "I don't know" as an answer. Maybe. All we can definitively say from the report is that ONLY 74% of Americans KNOW the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun.