Petroleum, Refineries, and the Future

Why the general public is ignorant about the Science

Although we are heavily dependent on the fuel products every day of our life, it might be overwhelming for a common person to go through all the science behind this. In addition to this, the public might find it unnecessary to be aware and educated about the theory and seem to leave it to the scientists. However, a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Sharon Hill thinks quite opposite. As she says, “Members of the public don’t know much about science, and they seem fine to leave science to scientists. That’s Trouble” (Hill).

We can see how ignorant general public are in terms of scientific knowledge in the context of the United States. For example, Baron says in a 2001 survey in the US, only 22% could define a molecule (Baron). Also, according to an article by Jeremy Hugh Baron from Division of Gastroenterology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “A poll in 2002 found that half favoured creationism and believed God made humans in the last 10 000 years” (Baron).

There are some reasons behind why the general public do not appreciate science too often. Majority of the American population spend huge portion of their time in entertaining activities like watching television rather than informative activities like reading theoretical books. This is one of the reasons why the citizens are unaware and uninformed of the science and theories. According to the same article “What should the citizen know about ‘Science’?”, a little less than half of the Americans learn about science from TV, and then from other informative sources such as newspapers, books and the internet. “By 1999 this had fallen to only 41%, yet each day 63% watched at least an hour of news. The average American watched more than 4 hours of TV each day; young Americans spent 900 hours each year in school and 1023 hours watching TV” (Baron).

As discussed in the article by Sharon Hill, most of the science courses in high school and sometimes even in the college level education are all about memorizing. Although many students have science classes to their credits, they do not know any laws off the top of their heads. This is due to the easy access to internet, which is the biggest source of information for any scientific topics. By using the computers and mobile devices we have in our daily life, anyone has an access to any information at their fingertips through the internet. People “don’t ever need to memorize another factoid that isn’t pertinent to their daily activities. They can just look it up” (Hill).




Works Cited
 
Baron, Jeremy Hugh. “What Should the Citizen Know about ‘science’?” Journal of the Royal
          Society of Medicine 96.10 (2003): 509–511.
Hill, Sharon. “Appreciating Science: A New Approach to Science in our World.” The Committee
          for Skeptical Inquiry, 14 Nov 2012, Web. Accessed 20 Nov 2017.
 

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