College students lack scientific literacy, study finds

Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.

Rough calculation: Assume you breathe in around a liter each time at 20 breaths per second minute. To make the math a little easier, let’s make that 22.4 L of an ideal gas per minute, which is one mole. Increase the CO2 by 1.5% in each cycle, which takes a Carbon atom out of your body. That’s 0.015*12g*60*24 = 260 g. You lose more than half a pound just breathing each day.

Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”

Feynman told us this.

College upperclassmen still fail at scientific reasoning

Related to/based on the first article; it adds a few other points.