Write the Name of a Gas

I found this picture in an image collection at The Chive called It’s nearly impossible to argue with kid logic. I believe 7-year-old Elijah had a perfectly good answer on number ten, yet the teacher marked it wrong. Isn't a fart a gas? Yet, it is. According to Wikipedia, farts are composed mostly of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane.

It's possible that the test required answers that were part of class discussion, but one gets the feeling that the teacher objected to the vulgarity of the term fart. If that was the case, she could have suggested the terms "flatulence" or "methane" as a substitute. Telling a child that a word is inappropriate is very different from telling a kid that he's wrong on a science test. After all, families who don't use the term "fart" are very likely to say "gas." Any 7-year-old knows they mean the same thing. What do you think?

(Image credit: Christine Lee)

Should the teacher have marked this answer as wrong?

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For #7, I don't think there is any age that should show up on a quiz. Since "matter" isn't precisely defined in general science, it is not a well formed questioned. I suppose it could be a leading question in an intro philosophy class where you are more questioning the definition of "everything," or a question in a physics class in one of the few subfields that specifically uses matter to refer to things with rest mass (why have a quiz like this at that level though...). Otherwise it amounts to, "Are things made of stuff?"

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But we all know that teachers don't live in the real world, don't we.

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Yours surely won't contain elemental sulfur in a solid state, otherwise your's would rather be "dusty"...
You could consider "Hydrogen sulfide", which is actually gaseous under normal conditions.
Science is not amazing as such, but it has amazingly good self-healing powers.

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Besides hydrogen, methane, etc. mine apparently contain sulfur. Lots of sulfur. And sulfur isn't even a gas. Isn't science amazing!

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I would have required the student to explain their answer in more detail. If they could name one or more specific gases in a fart, I would give them credit. By the same logic, air is made up of three main types of gasses with trace amounts of others, but if it is a good teacher, they would have already covered that topic and the students would already know this. I don't know a teacher that has covered the content of a fart in that much detail.

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