Do female crickets sing and why does the Earth spin? Try our kids’ quiz

1. Dogles, 11, asks: do female crickets sing or only males?

   1. Females are the only crickets that sing

   2. Male and female crickets sing

   3. Mostly it’s just the males

   4. We have no idea about this!

2. Wayan, 9, asks: how do flowers grow?

   1. When a seed has the right amount of sunlight, air, water and food, it will grow into a flower

   2. They grow when someone wants to smell them

   3. Tiny flower fairies help a flower to grow

   4. Flowers grow when they are sprinkled with magic

3. Sasya, 9, asks: why does the Earth spin?

   1. An alien spun it hard a long time ago and it still hasn’t stopped

   2. The whole solar system was rotating when Earth formed

   3. It spins because it wants us to have day and night

   4. The Earth spins because the oceans move

4. Satya, 7, asks: why does the sun rise?

   1. It rises when it’s got its hat on and it’s coming out to play

   2. The sun gets sent a special signal by the Greenwich Observatory to rise and begin shining

   3. The sun seems to rise and set because the Earth spins

   4. The sun rises when the moon goes out

5. Meilani, 9, asks: how do you make plastic?

   1. By heating things like cellulose, natural gas, crude oil or coal

   2. It’s made from stinky stuff you find in a landfill

   3. It’s made by goblins

   4. Aliens make it, then dump it on Earth so our planet gets more polluted than other planets in space

Solutions

1:C - If you hear a cricket singing it’s probably a male, as the female of most species of cricket don’t have the sound-making wing structure to make a noise., 2:A - Flowers grow from seeds. When the seed has all the air, water, light and food from soil that it needs, it will sprout, growing a stem above the ground, with green leaves and a bud, and roots below. Soon the bud opens into a flower., 3:B - Astronomers think the Earth spins because the solar system was rotating when it formed. Everything in the solar system spins, counter clockwise, the same way Earth spins. , 4:C - The sun seems to rise in the east because the Earth carries you eastwards as it turns, so whatever lies over the eastern horizon becomes visible. As it spins, different parts of the planet face the sun, so we get sunrise in the morning and sunset in the evening at different times all over the world., 5:A - Plastic is made by heating things like cellulose from plants, coal, natural gas and oil, to break them into molecules, which are then turned into chains of molecules that form plastics

Scores

1. 5 and above.

2. 4 and above.

3. 3 and above.

4. 2 and above.

5. 0 and above.

6. 1 and above.

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and the new Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book.

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