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.

  • Back to the Gödel, Escher, Bach page.   John Lawler