It's unfortunate that the interesting debate/study of whether or not we should play god and whether we are capable of dealing with the long term consequences is subsumed by pseudoscience.

> Historically, plants were treated as one of two kingdoms including all living things that were not animals, and all algae and fungi were treated as plants. However, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria).

I totally agree that it's often used as you describe, but on a test of scientific knowledge, yours is probably not the relevant definition, especially one with questions about bacteria and viruses. In this case, it was though!

We're not meticulously trying to catalogue life on Earth.

You know... It's a case of is tomato a fruit or a vegetable.

the atoms came from stars (hand wave). those atoms have probably been recently recombined to form the diatomic gas, by plants.

Here's the paper, which isn't linked from most journalists reporting on it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3

Google "sci-hub" if you want open access to it, using it's doi https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3

Here's one of the surveys they used. It appears they all had the same science questions. https://osf.io/9gztf/ (Study1 Survey.pdf)

Here are the questions:

The center of the earth is very hot: True

The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True

Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False

All radioactivity is man made: False

Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True

All insects have eight legs: False

The earth orbits the sun: True

Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True

The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move: True

Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False

Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

All plants and animals have DNA: True

Humans share a majority of their genes with chimpanzees: True

It is the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl: True

This depends on what exactly you mean by "smaller than". My first thought is to consider the delocalized particle cloud, in which case this is false in the case of valence electrons.

Energy “originally” from sunlight even more “orginally” comes from the strong force.

The antibiotic neomycin has been shown to have therapeutic effect against multiple viruses.

It’s the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl is not true if you are talking about “boy” and “girl” as self-determined gender identity rather than biological sex. Might have been clearer to frame this as male or female baby.

Yeah, we all know what's ACKCHYUALLY [0] true, but given the context and elementary wording of the questions, you know the correct answer.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/jDBr2RI.png