Clearly evolution is only theoretical. Ha!

Let some hillbillies fire me for witchcraft and see what would happen......I'd start a fucking coven in that town, and lure their daughters away.....

Who gives a fiddler's fuck about how we got here?? Evolution explains about 20 percent of the big picture anyhoo....the critical issue is this:
People are useful in masses, when their heads are up their asses, buried in pussy, television, and fatty foods, and wondering who is going to win what and where....We need to kill the son of a bitches keeping us in this state, if we ever want to see any REAL evolution on this motherfucker-drag then out of their high towers, kill them, their offspring, and for crissakes build a monument to the day we freed our minds-Non-linear is the only way to evolve....not in some goddamn straight line-(I haven't said fuck Obama in the ass today yet...."Fuck Obama up in his ass!")

So the Chinese score below 50% correct for most of the questions (in some cases well below), but hit 70% on the evolution question, what's going on there?

The chinese education system probably hammers that home to prevent the spread of religion. The communist party there has an interest in doing so.

In the US and in the EU, the general majority knew the answers to almost all the answers with the exception of those that are either unproven or subject to religious opposition. In Democracy, majority rules, so our democracy is in the hands of a not completely incompetent population. In addition, these questions bare almost NO consequence on daily life and law. On top of that, I think you'll find that people who don't know shit, don't do shit, and don't vote.

Still, if you don't know the [assumed true] answer to (this), you're (this):
Question 1: A moron.
2: Brainwashed
3: Old
4: Not thinking
5: Not interested in science (normal)
6: Old (or misinformed) (in general normal, your doctor needs to know this more than you do)
7: Religious (normal) or uninformed (unfortunate) or apathetic (even more normal)
8: Religious (normal) or uninformed (unfortunate) or apathetic (even more normal)
9: Religious (normal) or uninformed (unfortunate)
10: Moron

We can't all know everything folks, even if I do. Most people probably knew a number of the questions, but not all of them. This doesn't mean that about 50% of the world is stupid, it means 50% of the questions are not common knowledge. Also don't forget this study isn't studying only college graduates. It likely covers people of most ages (if it's any good), so that means your grandma as well that uncle that's always drunk at family reunions... Remember that before you despair. Do you really expect your grandma who spent her life in social work to give a crap what an electron is or what Pangaea was?

Average voters require a framework of scientific knowledge within which to guage the truthfulness of statements about economic policy, energy policy, domestic policy, etc. Otherwise they have nothing good to base such opinions on and there's a lemming effect. If average voters don't have to know science, then neither do the politicians, and if the politicians don't know science that's very bad.

I'm not trying to forgive ignorance, I'm just saying that people don't all have the same knowledge set. Ask me about science all day long, but kindly don't ask me about contemporary poetry. I can tell you who Linus Pauling is or the charge of and code for each aminoacid, but all I know about Immanuel Kant is that he was "a real pissant and was very rarely stable." Sometimes you have to trust what experts tell you. Otherwise you'll wind up a Jack of all trades and a master of none. That, and not everyone is smart.

The fact that people should know most of these answers goes without saying, but understanding why those that don't don't is far more interesting to me than what they in fact know. How the heck can you NOT know that the center of the earth is hot?! Where is all that molten rock coming from, the sky?

I'd be interested in seeing a poll of our house and senate with the same questions.

Unless they asked ancient guys plowing fields behind oxen, the numbers for china don't look right, especially the one about lasers and sound waves, especially since it's from 2001.
From personal experience, the 20 and 30 somethings there are very knowledgeale about applied commercial industrial science.

I've known the answers to all of these since age 13 at the latest... I don't know how you can watch PBS and not be exposed to all of these frequently enough to remember them.

These are basic facts about the world which among a thousand similar tidbits inform your worldview. Ignorance of half of these correlates with ignorance of hundreds of other basic facts about the universe and, IMHO, leads to religious extremism.