Science Questions For Primary School Kids!

Gravity is a force that causes objects with mass to attract one another. The more mass an object has, the stronger it’s gravitational pull. This is why, on earth, what goes up must come down. You are not really falling ‘down’ but being pulled back towards the earth because the earth is much larger than you and therefore has a much a much stronger gravitational pull than your own body. This is the same reason the moon rotates the earth and the earth rotates the sun. The earth is ‘stuck’ in the suns stronger gravitational pull and so is rotating the sun and the moon is ‘stuck’ in the earth’s stronger gravitational pull and so rotates the earth.

Like all mammals, whales breathe air into lungs, are warm-blooded, feed their young milk from mammary glands, and have some (although very little) hair. Fish, on the other hand, are hairless, covered in scales, lay eggs, are typically cold blooded and absorb oxygen from the water through gills. The Welsh live in a country called Wales in the United Kingdom, not inside whales.

An ecosystem is a more complex explanation of ‘the circle of life.’ For example, within an ecosystem you might be able to observe the sun, earth and water feeding the grass, cows then eat the grass, a lion eats the cow and when the lion dies his body decomposes and fertilises the grass.

H2O is a symbol that represents the ingredients, called elements, which make water. ‘H’ stands for Hydrogen and ‘O’ stands for Oxygen. The ‘2’ means that there are two atoms of Hydrogen for every one atom of Oxygen.

A light-year is a unit of length, just like a metre or kilometre, except a light year is equal to just under ten trillion kilometres! It is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year. The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars and other far away objects or destinations in space. Some of the stars you ‘see’ in space are actually just the light from far away suns that has taken thousands of years to reach earth.

Although magnets do have north and south poles, magnets don’t necessarily have a ‘top’ or ‘bottom.’ Each end of the magnet is called a ‘pole’, with the force of the magnet travelling from the south to the north. This is why two magnets will stick together if the north and south ends are facing, but will push away from each other if either both north ends or both south ends are facing. The earth is like a giant magnet with its own magnetic field, each end of the earth has a pole which we call north and south.

The Milky Way is shaped like a flat spiral. This means that it has a disc-like structure with a central bulge and spiral arms extending from it. This shape is commonly observed in spiral galaxies, including our own. The term "flat" refers to the fact that the disc is relatively thin compared to its diameter. The Milky Way's flat spiral shape is a result of the gravitational forces acting on the stars and gas within the galaxy.

Dogs, cats and apple trees are all living creatures. Although plants do not move or eat like animals (except Venus Flytraps), they are alive. Plants grow and have children - their seeds are like plant ‘eggs’, and seedlings like ‘baby’ plants. Plants ‘breathe’ in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen and ‘eat’ by absorbing nutrients from the ground and from the sun. It is also possible for plants to die. Water, although capable of moving down a hill and swallowing a leaky boat, is not a living creature. It does not breathe, grow or have children and cannot die because it was never alive.

Although sometimes called ‘Shooting Stars’, comets are not stars. Stars are giant balls of fire called ‘plasma’, while Comets are made up of collections of ice, dust and small rocky particles, measuring a few kilometres or tens of kilometres across. Comets glow because solar radiation (sunlight) from stars reflects off the ice like a mirror, as the comet moves this reflection looks like a tail and is called a ‘coma’. Asteroids do not reflect any sunlight and so do not have a tail.