Only 4% Of People Can Get This High School Question Correct

Once you enter the working world, you might begin to miss the good old days when you barely had to worry about home work. You might wonder what school kids could possibly have to complain about – with their weeks and weeks of holiday and freedom from bills and taxes. Their life must be so easy, you might say. You might even think doing it all over again would be a walk in the park for you. If you want to prove this – eager smarty pants that you are – we can put that to the test right now.

The Oxford Open Learning Trust, an organisation which offers distance learning support, has developed a ‘Would You Pass’ quiz in six main subject areas. The quizzes are all based on GCSE exams which many students in Britain take around the age of 16. Three subjects in particular (Science, Mathematics and Geography) offer a mixture of modern GCSE and old O Level questions – the exams which GCSEs replaced in 1988.

One question in particular has stumped most respondents and was featured in the Environmental Science quiz. If you can answer the question below correctly, you’ll have something in common with the few British adults who got it right.

Q: Which of the following cannot be produced by selective breeding?

1. A more uniform crop
2. A higher yielding crop
3. A crop with a greater environmental tolerance
4. A crop with genes not present in its parents.

The correct answer is Option 4. A crop with genes not present in its parents cannot be produced by selective breeding. If you got that one wrong, don’t worry. Only 4% of British adults who took the test answered that question correctly so you’re not alone. However, next time you want to show off your GCSE level science knowledge, you might want to reconsider

Perhaps it was because of questions like these that Environmental Science didn’t score highly when 1,000 British adults were asked to rank which subjects they would have liked to take when they were at school. The top five subjects mentioned were Computer Science (40%), Law (24%), Psychology (24%), Business Studies (22%) and Economics (21%).

Speaking on these results, founder of Oxford Open Learning Trust Dr Nick Smith said:

“Modern GCSEs are great for teaching a more vocational set of skills, but core subjects are still extremely important to overall education and job prospects.

“It’s never too late to learn new skills or take another GCSE and our ‘Would You Pass’ quiz gives adults an idea of what some of the new modern GCSE exam questions are like.”

Well, this quiz certainly gives an idea of modern GCSE questions: in contrast to growing criticism that exams are getting easier, these exams are not as easy as many might think. 2016 saw the worst slump in GCSE success rates in a decade. 66.9% of students got a “good” A*- C grade across all subjects – a 2.1% drop since the exams launched in 1988.

The ‘Would You Pass’ quiz suggests adults wouldn’t do much better if faced with the same questions but. fortunately for you, only GCSE students have to worry about this. Not only will they be facing exams and the nail-biting wait for results, they may have to contend with a brand new grading system being rolled out across England, which will replace the A* – G scoring system with numbers 1 – 9. Your 9-5 isn’t looking so bad now, is it?