Life Without Eyes Trivia Quiz

Answer: Touch

The Braille system was developed by a man named Louis Braille in the 1820s. It is still used today by many people, although screen readers -- in which your computer reads out loud to you -- are more popular. The Braille alphabet represents every letter and number with a particular pattern of raised dots that you can feel with your fingertips.

Answer: American Sign Language

American Sign Language, or ASL, is commonly spoken by people who are deaf or hearing impaired. In this language, you communicate with your hands, and there are specific signs and gestures for words and letters. You need to be able to see the gestures to understand their meaning.

Hundreds of thousands of people speak ASL, all over North America.

Answer: Smell

Natural gas is often used in homes and other buildings for power, heat and cooking. But if there's a leak, and the gas starts to build up where it isn't supposed to be, you might get an explosion. Natural-gas explosions can destroy whole buildings, so it's very important to be able to detect a leak.

The gas is naturally invisible, but a bad smell is added to it before the gas is piped into homes and other buildings. If you smell rotten eggs inside, it might be a gas leak, and you should tell an adult and leave the building.

Answer: Wetness

It doesn't take a taste bud to tell you whether something's wet or not -- that's something you can do with your sense of touch.

Most scientists agree that there are five basic kinds of taste: bitterness, saltiness, sourness, sweetness, and umami. (Umami is a savory kind of taste that turns up in soy sauce and cheese.) Just imagine: the whole complicated taste of your favorite food is just a combination of those five ingredients!

Answer: Satellites

"GPS" stands for "Global Positioning System". It's a system of satellites that orbit the Earth. Every satellite has a clock on it, and constantly transmits its time and location to the surface of the planet. A GPS receiver, like the one in a phone, hears from several satellites and then calculates where it must be, based on how long it took to receive the message from each satellite. Phones these days are VERY good at geometry.

Answer: No

Sound waves need something to travel in, the same way that waves at the beach wouldn't exist without water. The thing the sound travels through -- the "medium" -- vibrates in tune with the sound wave, and these vibrations carry the sound. In everyday life, the medium is usually air, but it could also be water or even the bones of your face, if you're listening to your own voice.

In space, though, there's nothing for the sound to travel through, so there's nothing to hear.

Answer: Peach

The skin of a peach has fine hairs on it, though some peaches are fuzzier than others. A ripe apple is harder to the touch than a ripe peach, and it has a smooth skin. An orange peel is tougher than apple or peach skin, and is slightly bumpy or pitted to the touch. Cherries have smooth skin, but are much smaller than peaches, apples, or oranges.

Answer: The singer is probably a man.

The sound of a person's voice comes from vibrations in their vocal cords, which affect the way air flows through their throat. The vocal cords tend to thicken when a child grows up, changing the sound the cords make when they vibrate. Grown men usually have thicker vocal cords than grown women, so their voices are usually lower. Of course, there's a wide range, and some men have higher voices than some women.

Answer: Hearing

When you tap something, you can learn about it from the noise it makes. For example, try taking a spoon and tapping both a wall and your bed. You might not feel a difference, but you can tell by listening which one is softer and which one is harder. In the same way, you can often tell whether something is solid or hollow. Try tapping on an empty box, and then filling it with pencils and tapping again. Do you hear a difference?

I've always hoped to find a secret passage by tapping on walls, but I haven't yet.

Answer: Dogs smell better than humans can.

A human being can't beat a dog's sense of smell. You can get an idea just by comparing noses. Even a big human nose is small compared to the rest of the person's head -- but a dog's face is almost all nose! Not only do dogs have more nose than we do, but they also use more of their brains to figure out just what it is they're smelling.