The World

[asterroc]

I'm trying to understand something. Please answer the below questions to the best of your ability.

[Poll #1397877]

What I'm trying to understand is why my students are unable to distinguish between the planet Earth and the entire universe. For example, I said "1. How is the world (the planet Earth) going to end?
2. Which of the three scenarios for the end of the universe do YOU think is most likely?" And they answered #1 with "Big Crunch, Big Rip, or Heat Death," and for #2 picked their favorite. The correct response for #1 is "When the Sun runs out of Hydrogen in its core, it will expand as a red giant and engulf the planet Earth."

This time I explicitly wrote "(the planet Earth)" in the question to try and avoid the mix-up from the colloquial usage of the word "world". I think I need to just never ever use the word "world" again in astronomy.

Comments

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you'd chip in w/ your linguistics viewpoint.

1) I plan to do this in the future.

2) The problem is that I want to tease out that the students know the difference between the origins and fates of the Universe and the Earth, in an assignment with only 2 questions. I guess I could entirely rework the questions to something like "compare and contrast how the Earth and how the Universe will end," but IMO that is a meaningless question as the two don't really have anything in common.

Do you think if I just did "1. How will the planet Earth end? 2. How will the universe end?" that would be sufficient? Another option is to add in or substitute "how will life on Earth end?" - some of my readers here already interpreted the question that way.

[q10.livejournal.com]

well, i should warn you that i don't really have any special linguistics expertise on these subjects - just the results of some casual observation. i think the revised version you mention will probably diminish the effect, and if you only have two questions, so you can't space them out, it's about the best you can do. also remember that students will find some ways to screw things up no matter how good the directions are. one should do one's best to avoid making things more ambiguous or misleading than necessary, but one isn't obligated to include a little clause to specifically dispel every possible misreading (and even if one did, most people probably wouldn't read it).