http://offbeat.topix.com/quiz/17276?...medium=5430659

Tell me your score and be honest. :-)

Your Score: 94%

Where did you get my score ??


I am a retired chemist, so I had some training. :-)

I tried it just to see if I could still remember the table. Got 100% and was told I had a doctorate in chemistry. Now how did they know that?

I also got 100%, mostly because the wrong answers often were a joke.
There were five or six questions were I didn't get the joke at first, so I took an educated guess and was just lucky.

And, no, I do not have a PhD in Chemistry. Not even close.

The funny thing is you don't learn the periodic table by doing a PhD. Then you're focused in on one little area of research. You learn the periodic table (if you learn it at all) as an undergraduate. We learned mnemonics for the first part of it, where all the common elements are. I can still remember them:

Hear little beggar boys catching newts or fishes. New nature magnifies all sins. P.S. chlorine! A king can scream till Violet cries.

That takes you as far as chromium. I think iron, cobalt and nickel follow, but I'm hazy on the rest.

I didn't finish it - I got too upset when I got to Pt and saw how they misspelled "planet-aarium".

As an aside, I once found (and, cabbaged into a project I was working on at the time) a periodic table that was entirely generated using XSLT transforms of an XML input ... within your browser.

The jokes are less obvious when you consider some of the names given to the trans-uranide elements. There's an old chemists' joke that someone at Berkeley was once asked why they didn't use the names Universitium and Ofium for the two elements before Berkelium and Californium. He answered that this would have been an open invitation to other university teams to muscle in on their research, and the next two elements might have ended up being called Newium and Yorkium.

98%, one incorrect and two lucky guesses.

Was this test a joke? Even people not knowing the actual names could guess enough right answers to score in the 90 percentile range.

I got Your Score: 100%
PhD in Chemistry
Whoa! You were clearly in your element during this quiz. You're basically a DOCTOR of chemistry!

but take no pride in such an "elementary" test. (Sorry. Couldn't resist. )

Thanks for the warning! I covered up the answers until I'd identified the abbreviation. I'd forgotten Thallium, so I only got 98%. I learned my elements at school!

Your Score: 98%

Not bad since I'm a historian turned trainer turned geek who last studied chemistry when Humphrey was running against Nixon. I bombed out on one of the ones from the very high end of the scale which, for all I know, didn't exist back them.

I note, though, that many of the "wrong" answers were not elements at all. You don't have to know a lot of chemistry to know that "bundtcakium" is not an element.

"Your Score: 100%
PhD in Chemistry
Whoa! You were clearly in your element during this quiz. You're basically a DOCTOR of chemistry!"

There were a few that were tricky but most of them were obvious like Li stands for Lithium or Linuxium.