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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Part 3, Chapter 9.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to the Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, the most important discovery ever made is what?
(a) Penicillin.
(b) Pasteurization.
(c) Electricity.
(d) Atoms.

2. How far away is Proxima Centauri from Earth?
(a) 100 million times farther than our moon.
(b) 390 million times farther than Venus.
(c) 700 million times farther than Mars.
(d) 120 million times farther than our sun.

3. Pluto is the first planet to be discovered by an:
(a) Austrian.
(b) Argentine.
(c) Australian.
(d) American.

4. After noticing an unusual phenomenon with uranium salts and a photographic plate, Henri Becquerel asked one of his graduate students to investigate the matter. Who was this student?
(a) Louise Désirée Lorieux.
(b) Marie Curie.
(c) René Just Haüy.
(d) Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.

5. Astronomer Edmond Halley approached mathematician Sir Isaac Newton to get his help figuring out why planets:
(a) Spin on their axes.
(b) Are round.
(c) Orbit the sun in ellipses.
(d) Vary in size.

Short Answer Questions

1. Many scientists suspect that Pluto is just a comet of the:

2. In 1903, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering radioactivity?

3. When French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally left a packet of uranium salts on a photographic plate, what happened?

4. A hundred years before Einstein's math analyses confirmed the existence of atoms, this self-educated scientist suggested everything is made up of tiny, unchangeable particles:

5. The Geiger counter is a:

(see the answer key)

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