Sneaky Wrong Answers                         Name:____________________

Worksheet #2

Directions:  After each passage, there are two possible answers--  and one is an answer where the truth has been “switched”. Decide which statement is false because it is a “switch”, and place a check on the line.

Twenty or thirty thousand years ago Homo Sapiens were uncommon animals, wandering alone or in small groups in a constant search for food. Primitive humans lived by the hunt, and modern nutritionists like to observe that with meat as dietary staple, they were seldom iron-deficient as are many farm-based populations today. But the absence of iron deficiency was perhaps the only advantage to the hunting lifestyle of the time. The hunter, it should be remembered, may find himself the hunted, and by anything approaching our own standards today, primitive human life was unstable and incessantly hazardous.

In this regard, however, the advent of agriculture improved the human condition. Between ten and twenty thousand years ago human beings discovered the use of herding and of growing, which apparently served as inspiration to man's mechanical facilities. Relatively crude weapons of hunt were replaced by more refined farming implements. To be sure, farming is subject to the uncertainties of weather and control over their food supply and relieves them from the dangers of the hunt.

                                                 It's A Switch!

In terms of the tools and implements made by primitive man, the passage suggests that:          

A. farming tools were less sophisticated than hunting weapons                _____

B. [already eliminated]

C. agriculture is associated with more advanced tool-making skills            _____

D. [already eliminated]

According to the passage, a life based on agriculture:

    F. [already eliminated]

    G. provides humans with more iron than is provided by hunting                _____   

    H. [already eliminated]

    I. offers a greater degree of certainty than does a hunting lifestyle                _____

In certain critical respects the magnificence of science lies not in its discovery of what is true but in its identification of that which is not. Pivotal points in scientific learning are those at which some long-held assumption is openly examined and exposed as a falsehood. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and ultimately Newton established that the sun, not the earth, is the fixed center of the solar system and that the earth orbits the sun, thus invalidating the views of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which were largely unquestioned before that time.

    Toward the turn of the last century, Michelson, Morley, Lorentz, and Einstein successfully challenged a host of assumptions about the absolute quality of space and time. Then, in the 1920s, theories put forward by Heisen berg, Schrodinger, and Dirac together created the science of quantum mechanics and thus destroyed time-honored views about position and velocity. Even Einstein had difficulty accepting Heisenberg's theory, which dealt a lethal blow to the cherished notion, advocated especially by LaPlace, that science could aspire to complete knowledge of the state of the universe and thus predict its future.

In 1929, Hubble, versed in the writings of Olbers one hundred years before him, showed that the universe was finite but expanding, and more or less did away with the prevailing belief that the universe had to be either finite and static or infinite.

                                                 It's A Switch!

According to the passage, Ptolemy differed from Copernicus in that:

    A. Ptolemy envisioned a stationary earth and Copernicus did not                _____

    B. [already eliminated]

    C. [already eliminated]

    D. Ptolemy postulated that the earth followed an orbit about                 ______

        the sun and Copernicus did not.

According to the passage, Heisenberg's theory:

    A. already eliminated

    B. challenged traditional beliefs about position and velocity                _____

    C. described a universe that could be understood and predicted                _____

    D. already eliminated

The Aristotelian conception of the solar system was:

    A. inconsistent with Newtonian and Galilean insights                    _____   

    B. at odds with Copernican and Ptolemic views.                        _____

    C. already eliminated

    D. already eliminated

In the first paragraph the author makes the point that natural science can be:

    A. important in that it shows certain propositions to be true                _____

    B. important in that it shows certain propositions to be false                _____

    C. less precise than most scientists believe                            _____

    D. extremely misleading to those who fail to question its premises.            _____

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