World Scholar's Cup Science and Technology — practice questions
44 free MCQs with worked solutions. Tap any question for the answer + explanation, or practice them all in the app.
Practice World Scholar's Cup Science and Technology in the app →Kepler inherits decades of hand-recorded planetary positions and builds his laws on them. Those records were mKepler cracks the puzzle of changing orbital speed using one planet whose orbit strays furthest from a circle.A student draws a planet's yearly path as a neat circle and is told the shape is wrong. The correct shape is:In that corrected drawing, where should the student place the Sun?An astronomer states an orbit's size as the distance from the centre of the ellipse to one end. She is quotingTwo orbits share the same major axis, but one has its foci much further apart. That difference is measured by A comet sweeps a broad wedge near the Sun and a long thin one far away, each in a month. This equal sweeping iA comet's speed is tracked all the way around its orbit. It moves fastest when it is:A planet on a perfectly circular orbit is timed at many points along the path. Its speed would be:Kepler discovered his third law in the year:Earth takes one year to travel once around the Sun. That stretch of time is called its:An astronomer wants solar system distances in handy units and takes the Earth to Sun distance as one. That uniA newly found body orbits with a semimajor axis of 50 astronomical units. Its orbital period is about:That newly found body, 50 astronomical units out, would sit beyond the orbit of:A rocky chunk orbits with a semimajor axis of 3 astronomical units. Its orbital period is about:A rocky body on a 3 astronomical unit orbit would be found between:An astronomer wants to apply the period and distance law to Earth itself. That law applies to:Two spacecraft drift twice as far apart. The gravitational pull between them depends on their masses and theirIn the gravitation formula, the fixed number written as G is known as the:A rocket must be fast enough never to fall back to Earth. That speed is called the:Knowing an orbit's shape and the equal area rule, an astronomer can work out a planet's:An astronomer can only measure how long a distant body takes to circle the Sun. She finds its distance using tA student groups the four planets nearest the Sun, Mercury out to Mars, under one name. That name is:The four huge outer planets take their group name from another word for Jupiter. They are the:Standing outside with no telescope, how many planets besides Earth could the ancients pick out?Two planets stayed hidden until the telescope arrived. Those two are:An icy world beyond Neptune was spotted in 1930, the first of its kind. It was:An astronomer writes a distance as 5 AU. One AU is the distance from the Sun to:Jupiter and Saturn share the Sun's chemical makeup. Hydrogen makes up what part of their mass?On Earth hydrogen and helium are gases, so the two biggest planets are sometimes called:Gravity sorts the inside of a young planet into layers of different composition and density. That process is:The Sun and planets formed together out of one spinning cloud of gas and dust. That cloud is the:Icy and rocky bodies that came before the planets, and built them, are known as:A geologist asks when most objects of the solar system formed alongside the Sun. The answer is about:A grain of space dust burns up in the air and streaks briefly across the night sky. That streak is a:A fragment of the Moon, Mars or Vesta lands on Earth and gets studied in a laboratory. That fallen piece is a:For a huge batch of uranium atoms, the time in which the odds of decay are fifty-fifty is the:A slow rain of projectiles from space has pockmarked solid surfaces across the solar system. Those marks are:One planet spins backwards, very slowly, against the usual direction of the others. That planet is:Two worlds spin about an axis tipped almost onto its side. They are:Ganymede, Callisto and Titan are each about half frozen water. The other half is:The largest asteroid is big enough to be classed as a dwarf planet too. It is:A student counts up the moons known to circle Pluto. The count is:Most asteroids were already there before the planets themselves took shape. That makes them: