Take the RUI Solar Power Trivia Quiz

Tonight's Reading Under the Influence event was a blast. I read with a couple of terrific Chicagoland writers, C.J. Arellano and Courtney Jones. Each of us read something original we'd written (I read the first few pages of Love Songs of the Revolution). Then we all had to come up with trivia questions related in some way to the topic of TOOLS, and read a short piece of someone else's writing that is somehow related. 

C.J. decided to define "tool" in the Urban Dictionary sense, and asked questions about T.V. characters who were tools, like Archie Bunker and somebody on the show Angel. Courtney asked about social media tools, and read a lovely excerpt from from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. 

I went with solar power cells as tools, and read a brief segment from Dr. Richard Komp's arresting classic, Practical Photovoltaics. So here's a chance to test your solar energy knowledge! See if you can answer my trivia questions (scroll down for the answers). 

1. What is the magical material that most solar panels made of? 
   
2. What is the Sun mostly made of? 
   
3. How long does it take light from the Sun to reach the Earth? 
   
4. What famous scientist was tried by the Inquisition in 1616 for writing that the Earth revolves around the Sun? 
   
5. How many more years until the Sun uses up all its energy, swallows up the Earth and all the planets of our solar system, and we all die? 

Bonus! Here's the tie-breaker question I had in my back pocket but didn't need to ask, because we had a total solar nerd in the audience: 

• On a cloudy day, or when there's haze or fog, what percent of the sun's rays penetrate clouds, haze or fog? 
  

From an earlier reading of Practical Photovoltaics

Answers: 

1. Silicon 
   
2. Hydrogen 
   
3. Eight minutes 
   
4. Galileo 
   
5. 5 billion years 
   

Bonus: 80 percent