I Used To Think That... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Rain

The theory was called "Rain Follows the Plow". If man was to inhabit more drier areas, more rain would accompany, making the land able to be used for agriculture. It was in believing this theory that more arid areas like the central United States, and South Australia were migrated too. Several settlements in Australia, backed by this theory, did not last long, brought to an end by drought.

Answer: Plasma

The fourth fluid was yellow bile. If a person had too much or too little of any of the four fluids they would become ill. Doctors would have to determine which fluid was out of proportion, and then decide how to correct the imbalance.

Answer: Edwin Hubble

With his telescope, Hubble noted that objects far away were moving much faster than those closer to the Earth. That discovery, along with decades of research led to scientists new claim in 1999, that the universe is ever-increasing rapidly, and the rate of expansion is growing as well.

Answer: Water

In their quest to determine the basic element of which all things are made, ancient Greek philosophers went through a long list. Anaximenes decided that the basic element was air; Anaximander concluded that it was an undefined substance which he called "the Boundless". It took nearly two hundred years of thinking and hypothesizing before Democritus came up with the atomic theory.

Answer: California

A large land mass appears off the west coast of America on many maps, all the way up until the 18th century. Rumors had it that this island was a paradise escape, similar to the Garden of Eden or Atlantis. Juan Bautista de Anza sailed up the west coast from 1774-76, and finally settled the confusion.

But who knows? With plate tectonics, geologists believe California will split from the US mainland within the next 25 million years.

Answer: Barbers

Guilds of barber surgeons were organized and they performed all the surgeries. The only role of the physician was to prescribe remedies for patients on the basis of their knowledge. Treatment could be in the form of diet, rest, drugs, or bleeding. Following the body fluid balance theory of Galen, they believed that bleeding a person would bring all of the fluids in balance.

Answer: Nicolaus Copernicus

The geocentric theory was conceived by the works by Ptolemy and Aristotle in Ancient Greece. It was based on the appeared movement of the sun, stars, and planets around the Earth, and the physical feeling that Earth was not moving. Based on the fear that his work would get him exiled by the Church, Copernicus did not fully publish his works on heliocentrism until he was on his deathbed in 1543.

Answer: Bad air

The word miasma comes from the ancient Greek for "pollution", which was thought to be a noxious form of "bad air". According to the Greeks, miasma was a poisonous vapor that contained particles of decomposed matter that contained a foul odor. This theory was finally disproved in the late 1800's with Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease.

Answer: Be set on fire

In its normal form, phlogiston was tasteless, odorless, and colourless. It could only been seen when the object was lit on fire. Once all phlogiston was released, the object was in its normal state, known as "calx". The theory also looked at the rusting of metals, and human respiration.

This theory eventually fell out of favour among scientists, opting for more modern explanations supported by laboratory research, like oxidation.

Answer: Windmill Cave

By the 1830s many scientists like Charles Lyell were presenting information that proved the world was much older than Ussher thought. Windmill Cave contained the bones of extinct animals like mammoths. Below the level of extinct animals, stone tools that were made and used by humans were uncovered.

The findings proved that humans lived longer ago than some extinct animal forms, and were read before the Royal Society in London the same year Darwin published his findings.