10 Questions: Science for Kids Multiple Choice Quiz | For Children

Answer: Oxygen

Oxygen is a chemical element. Its symbol is O and it comes in at number 8 on the periodic table. Although it comprises only one percent of the sun's mass, it's the most abundant element in the crust of our earth. We win! The sun itself is comprised of mostly hydrogen and helium, with much smaller amounts of other elements including oxygen, carbon, iron and neon.

Answer: It fizzes up everywhere

Vinegar contains anything up to twenty per cent of acetic acid. The taste of vinegar is a little bit sour and it has a rather strong smell if you'd like to take a whiff. It is used in the main today to flavour foods, but did you know it can also be used in a pile of cleaning jobs around the house instead of all those other expensive cleaning products? It gives glass and tiles a lovely shine for example, a little bit mixed with water in your final hair rinse can make your hair lovely and shiny, cleaning stainless steel sinks with it can make them as good as new, and, by boiling some in a burnt saucepan for a few minutes, voila, all the gunk comes off easily.

Baking soda, which is a base, is made up of sodium and bicarbonate ions. We actually call it bicarbonate of soda in Australia, although it is referred to as baking soda elsewhere. It can also be used for a number of cleaning and cooking jobs around the home. Stains can be removed from mugs and cups, for example, by rubbing them with a bit of baking soda, and if your Mum likes to bake her own bread, but has run out of yeast (the stuff that makes the dough rise) tell her to mix some powdered Vitamin C and some baking soda to equal the amount of the yeast instead. But back to adding some vinegar and baking soda together: Ask Mum if you can try it - just a little of both - and it'll fizz up everywhere. Great fun!

Answer: A positive charge

The positive charge can also be found in clouds, but where the negative charge (from electrons) form at the bottom of clouds, the positive charge (from protons) forms at the top. The negative charge always seeks out a positive charge with which to connect. Almost 25 per cent of all lightning seen takes place within clouds. However, when lightning strikes the earth, or a tall tree, or even an animal or person, a negative charge in a cloud has not located a positive charge nearby, but is attracted to one far below instead.

My brother-in-law, who was a farmer, was struck by lightning while out riding his horse one day. He or his horse must have held a positive charge. Fortunately, both survived, but I don't think they were feeling too positive at all after that experience.

Answer: Light travels faster than sound

Normally we see the lightning bolt initially, but then it can be some seconds before we hear the sound of thunder. That is because lightning (a visual phenomenon) is SEEN before we HEAR the sound of the thunder (an aural phenomenon), even though the thunder up in the clouds has been caused by the lightning. Light travels faster than sound in other words. Wow, this is amazing: Did you know that the temperature of lightning is 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit? That's extremely, extremely hot.

Did you also know that if you start counting "One little second, two little second, three little second" and so on, as soon as you see a flash of lightning - and stop counting as soon as you hear the thunder - each one of those seconds can give you a very rough estimate of how far distant is the coming rain? Three little seconds would be approximately three miles. That's a very rough guide only, and scientists would probably laugh at the idea and say that's just an old wives' tale. One last did you know for you: Whenever you see ants starting to come inside your home, or beginning to busily build little nests on your lawn, that's a sure sign rain is on the way.

Answer: There is no wind to blow them away

Down here on earth, with our lovely breezes and strong winds, each little puff of air has some effect on our environment in some way. A light breeze, for example, may be strong enough to blow leaves from a tree, and strong winds, for example, can completely alter the shape of sand dunes and even move them along. Changes such as that occur all the time here on earth, and all caused by our ever fluctuating effects of wind, earthquakes, the action of waves, floods, fire and goodness knows what else.

The poor old moon, though, has none of that. It doesn't have any wind at all, so those footprints on its surface, unless mankind one day lives on the moon and removes them manually, will stay there forever. It's just a little bit spooky isn't it? Like little footprint tombstones. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that, IF one day mankind has the ability to live on the moon, and IF those footprints have been covered over with strong glass and preserved, then, one day, people will be able to see a piece of astonishing history that could be thousands of years old.

Answer: The International Space Station

This of course will change one day as mankind looks at more and more ways to extend our search for other planets on which to live (though what could be more beautiful that our lovely earth?). Space stations will probably grow larger and larger still to accommodate all kinds of testing and living environments. It's going to be all very exciting. You'll be around to see it all developing and seeing mankind beginning to live on other planets, but I probably won't. That's the way of life though. We're born, we live, and then we finally die. So you should always make the most of every law-abiding and educational opportunity that comes your way as you grow up.

The international space state (ISS) was launched into space in 1998 as just a small module initially, but has grown larger and larger since that initial beginning. 159 more components have been added to it since then in fact. It is situated approximately 250 miles above the earth. Today it measures 239 feet in length, 356 feet in width, and is 66 feet in height. The maximum size of an American football field, for comparison, is approximately 360 x 270 feet. Basically, it's one giant research laboratory for trained specialists to test out "biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and other fields" and how they would impact on mankind if we all lived in space. It's absolutely fascinating to read about, and, hopefully, one day you'll be able to do a project on it at school.

Answer: 1920s

I was astonished to read that as I didn't know television had been around that long. That was in the United States of course. Even more fascinating is the knowledge that mankind was working on ways to send images and facsimiles way back in the 1840s! By 1900, television was well on the way to coming a reality, even though many countries in the world at that stage were still working on having electricity connected at all. By 1911, very rough images were being transmitted over wires to receiving facilities at the other end - and Mickey Mouse cartoons were just around the corner. The first transmitted image of a moving person was sent in 1926.

Within a couple more years, the first television station was established in New York. Images were very poor at first, but had improved out of sight by the late 1930s. The 1940s saw television stations competing with one another for the viewer's time, and then colour television was introduced in the 1950s. Digital televisions began to appear on the scene from the 1980s, then smart TV - and, finally, 3D televisions - but they were promptly abandoned, to my great sorrow.

Hopefully though, they'll try again with them soon, and then we can all have the joy of almost being able to reach out and touch a 3D image of our favourite characters. One more step I hope they'll also introduce one day is breezes, and scents and temperature controls to fit the atmosphere of any current show. It'd be truly amazing, wouldn't it? Imagine standing on Mount Everest, feeling the wind whip around you, and the cold air making the tip of your nose pink.

Answer: A duck

As in Donald Duck you see. This working robot was perfectly useless except for entertainment value. Invented by one Jacques de Vaucanson, a French inventor who lived from 1709-1782, the amazing thing about ducky however was that it could stretch its neck out, flap its wings up and down - and even swallow food. Why on earth would they want it to swallow food? It's not as though it could lay eggs. I wonder if it could quack as well? What's a duck without a quack? The wonderful thing about this duck is that it demonstrated that mankind had now the ability and knowledge to create mechanical, working robots. The sad thing was that although Vaucanson also drew up designs for a robot that could serve on tables and clear up afterwards, the government at that time said his designs were a form of profanity and ordered all his plans to be destroyed.

That didn't deter Vaucanson, that most brilliant man, though. He went on to design many other designs that could possibly benefit mankind in one way or another - but horrifyingly so, almost all were destroyed in the French Revolution (1789-1799). Only his very clever design of a machine that could weave threads survived - and even that design was stolen by another inventor.

Today of course we have robots that can perform many tasks once carried out by humans, from medical procedures to factory work, all of which are just the very tip of the robotic iceberg which will eventually be our future. Oh, and that digesting duck? Though it has long since been lost to mankind, its symbol, as a tribute to the mind of a great inventor, is now the official logo of an American software development company called Automatic Duck. So all's well that quacks well.

Answer: Ice

How amazing that water has the ability to present itself in three forms, don't you think? Why not have a think about it while you have a drink of that lovely refreshing gift of nature. The solid form of water is ice, then there is the gas or steam or vapour form (usually under the one heading of gas), and the liquid form which is called, unsurprisingly, water.

A few facts about water for you: It is made up of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Really, that is incredible, isn't it? Two different elements combining to form that most precious of commodities without which life on earth would not be possible. Seventy percent of our earth's surface is made up of water. Drinking water can even be obtained by desalinising the waters of the ocean. Interestingly, the freezing point of water lowers as the amount of salt dissolved in it increases. Seawater itself, with average levels of salt in its makeup, freezes at 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Salt is used to help melt snow on streets, but that added salt can cause corrosion of all metal products (such as that used in cars) and even corrode the metal bars reinforcing bridges - as well as increasing the salt content in ultimate water supplies and possibly damaging the ecological balance of many plants. It's a disgraceful solution, when there are other snow removal methods available.

Answer: Attract each other

Oh isn't that lovely - they're attracted to each other. How romantic. Gravity works all around us all the time, although most of us don't pay the slightest attention to it because it's always been there, and, while our earth exists, always will be. It keeps the moon and all the planets in our solar system in place, for example, keeps us anchored to the ground instead of floating away to Mars, is responsible for the weight of heavy objects landing on my toe should I accidentally drop them, and so on.

By the way, did you know that a person weighing about 200 lbs on earth only would weigh 76 lbs on Mars? A comforting thought for chubby people like myself, that's for sure. Our gravity suits us perfectly on this lovely world of ours. We couldn't function fully without it, and this is one problem that humans in the world of tomorrow will have to eventually solve as they begin to branch out in the universe and beyond.

But one thing you can be sure of. We WILL overcome that too, one day. It is in our nature.