Newspeak

If you want to take the above science “test” that I took you should do it before reading the rest of this post. 8th grade is usually attended by students aged 13-14.
Firstly, what did I get wrong…

A question about what comets are composed of, yes I’m guilty there, I know nothing about comets apart from that they fly across the sky and there’s one called Halley’s Comet that comes round every 70 years or so. As far as I recall it was never a topic at school and I’ve never really taken an interest in comets in my own time either.

I got the name of the process through which green plants lose water to the atmosphere, I answered “evaporation” when the answer it “transpiration”. I’m not going to beat myself about that one as the first line of the Transpiration page on Wikipedia tells me that “Transpiration is the evaporation of water from aerial parts of plants…”. Ok so I got the name wrong but I got the general mechanism right.

The last one I got wrong was “Meteoroids are hurtling through space and not captured in Earth’s atmosphere”, I said “Meteors”. Again, I’m bad at the names of things and at things that fly in space. It turns out that a Meteoroid is a bit of rock up to 10 metres across and a meteor is the visible trail of a meteoroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere. So, granted I got it wrong, but so did they and that makes me feel better.

Interestingly the first question about northern garter snakes I learnt about from a programming book, called “Twisted Network Programming Essentials”, which has a picture of snakes coiled together into a ball as is described in the question.