Actual excerpts from American students'
science exam papers
- Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species.
- Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backwards.
- The theory of evolution was greatly objected to because it made man think.
- Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes and caterpillers.
- The dodo is a bird that is almost decent by now.
- To remove air from a flask, fill it with water, tip the water out, and put the cork in quick before the air can get back in.
- The process of turning steam back into water again is called conversation.
- A magnet is something you find crawling all over a dead cat.
- Bar magnets have north and south poles, horseshoe magnets have east and west poles.
- The Earth makes one resolution every 24 hours.
- The cuckoo bird does not lay his own eggs.
- To collect fumes of sulfur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube.
- Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
- Algebraical symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about.
- Geometry teaches us to bisex angles.
- A circle is a line which meets its other end without ending.
- The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.
- The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.
- An example of animal breeding is the farmer who mated a bull that gave a great deal of milk with a bull with good meat.
- We believe that the reptiles came from the amphibians by spontaneous generation and study of rocks.
- English sparrows and starlings eat the farmers grain and soil his corpse.
- By self-pollination, the farmer may get a flock of long-haired sheep.
- If conditions are not favorable, bacteria go into a period of adolescence.
- Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.
- Vegetative propagation is the process by which one individual manufactures another individual by accident.
- A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.
- A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.
- Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
- A person should take a bath once in the summer, and not quite so often in the winter.
- The hookworm larvae enters the human body through the soul.
- When you haven't got enough iodine in your blood you get a glacier.
- It is a well-known fact that a deceased body harms the mind.
- Humans are more intelligent than beasts because the human branes have more convulsions.
- For fainting: rub the person's chest, or if a lady, rub her arm above the hand instead.
- For fractures: to see if the limb is broken, wiggle it gently back and forth.
- For dog bite: put the dog away for several days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.
- For nosebleed: put the nose much lower than the body.
- For drowning: climb on top of the person and move up and down to make artificial perspiration.
- For head colds: use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops in your throat.
- For asphyxiation: apply artificial respiration until the patient is dead.
- To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose.
- Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or negative.
- When water freezes you can walk on it. That is what Christ did long ago in wintertime.
- When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.