• Question: what was the most confusing question you've ever been asked?

    Asked by anon-188321 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 7 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      I once got asked by a student if they should put down ‘eyelids’ as a piece of equipment in their methods section of a study they had run. If you don’t know what a methods section is, when you run an experiment you have to write it up (we need to document it). We do this so other scientists run our experiment (or a similar experiment) in the future to see if they get the same result. To do this we have to carefully document a methods section which is basically a ‘recipe’ for the experiment others can use. The reason I found the above question mega confusing is because, although we normally document our equipment and how we used it, eyelids don’t normally count as a piece of equipment! We could end up listing a whole range of essential organs people needed to take part in our experiment 🙂

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Well most of the 10th grade was a blur of confusing questions for me, especially in chemistry class!
      And your question was confusing for me! 😀 Because I stopped and thought when was the last time I was asked a confusing question? Plenty of difficult and stressful questions but outright confusing???
      I think a time I was very confused would be during my viva- a verbal examination we give after we submit a report or thesis where our examiners ask us questions about it to make sure we know our stuff. My report was to explain why I was going to be focusing on dementia and British South Asians for my PhD. So I write this like 200 page monster explaining why I’m doing this research.
      And in the viva I get asked “so we read your report but we still don’t get why you’re doing this research?” and I was so confused because I was thinking isn’t that what the whole point of the report was??? I went all deer in headlights because I thought I’d messed up and not written it more clearly. anyway, it turned out to be a bit of miscommunication and the rest of the viva went fine!

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Heh, actually someone on here asked us “Why does haloumi taste so good”.. ! 😀

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