Hello and welcome to SOSquiz!
How the site works… Well, it’s quite simple really. Just click on an item in the MENU above that intrigues you, like “Save Our Seas”, and proceed to the page where you can read the brief Environmental Report about it, and then take the quiz to test your knowledge. If you don’t know what a particular word means, just click on it and it takes you to the definition in Wikipedia. If you think you know it all, or you’re just feeling lucky, try the quizzes before reading the reports. SOSquiz is written in plain English and tries to answer the What, Where, Why, When, Who and How. Consider environmental education a bit like classes in common sense, which seems to be the least common of the senses used these days. Education is a right, not a privilege, therefore, all written material found here is free to use, but not abuse. The website is the culmination of more than 40 years of education, activism, and experience and it focuses on human impact on the environment. We do not want to depress you, but we are not going to sugar-coat it for you either. Wherever we look there are environmental disasters in cities, countryside and oceans. It is more important than ever that we think critically about what is happening around us and talk to people to get them to do the same, and stop accepting the status quo as it is without question. Anyway, we are always trying to add new free content and quizzes about the environment, so enjoy the site and come back again soon to discover more knowledge and test it with our quizzes. Please remember that what goes up, must come down, what we sow, we shall reap, and a long list of viceverses… Good luck and have fun!

It’s not all doom and gloom though, so here are some awesome DAD JOKES about the environment…
– What’s the best way to start a climate change debate? With an icebreaker
– What’s life without a bit of fossil fuel humour? Hum-drum! (Ba dum, tss!)
– We might not have all the solutions for climate change yet,… but we’re definitely getting warmer!
– Most people claim they support recycling, but they sure get mad when someone recycles their joke
– How many climate change deniers does it take to change a light bulb? What are you talking about? It’s fine!
– Why do people think climate change activists are angry and crazy? Because they’re mostly mad scientists
– Man, I’m tired of people telling me to turn off my lights to save the environment. I tried it once, and nearly killed some poor bloke on a bike
– I began to worry about climate change when I was looking for a new house and the Real Estate Agent used the phrase: “Potential Waterfront Property”
– 2021 is all about noticing things we could’ve done differently. We should’ve done more to stop the spread of Coronavirus, poverty, wildfires and climate change, but you know what they say about hindsight… It’s 2020!
– Who knew climate change would have such a dramatic effect on Leonardo DiCaprio? If it weren’t for that iceberg sinking the Titanic in 1997, we would never have had the pleasure of watching him drown… (Only joking, buddy. I see you there Re:wilding the planet)
– The real reason we aren’t doing anything about climate change… Imagine how dumb we’d look in front of our children and grandchildren, if in twenty years time we discover climate change was, in fact, a hoax. We’d have cleaned up the environment, preserved rainforests and millions of species, removed dictatorships based on fossil fuels, created a more sustainable lifestyle and made a better world for our children for decades to come, but completely for nothing. How dumb would we look!

About the webmaster, designer, author, coffee maker… Steve Tayleur’s Autobiography
I would personally like to thank you for reading this far down the page. Anyway, I was born in Ipswich, Australia in 1975, and apparently, I was the 5th person born in Australia that year. I was raised on the lighthouses along the Queensland coast until I was 11. My family were stationed on Booby Island, Lady Elliot Island, Dent Island and finally, Pine Islet. My family also holds the distinction of being on the last 3 automated lighthouses in Australia. As other noteworthy events in my life go: I learnt to swim when I was 6 months old, walked at 8 months and learnt to ride a bike when I was 3. I became fascinated in the environment at the age of 4 when I discovered a yoghurt pot covered in barnacles supporting the 1972 Olympics held in Sapporo, Japan. It obviously looked like it had been floating around in the Pacific Ocean for those 7 years before I found it washed up on the beach at Lady Elliot Island, the most Southerly point of the Great Barrier Reef. On February 23rd, 1980, Category 4 Severe Tropical Cyclone Simon hit Lady Elliot Island. I remember the wind howling through the trees in the evening and wave splash flying overhead, which was already quite an experience, but then early in the morning we discovered the Thisbe, a large sailing vessel, washed onto the reef and my family participated in the rescue of the crew. I spent years playing in the wreckage watching it disintegrate as Mother Nature slowly took back what was once hers. Every morning, I enjoyed fishing to catch my breakfast, which my mother would prepare freshly fried in butter. Delicious! We were transferred to Dent Island shortly before Severe Tropical Cyclone Elinor passed over the island on February 26th, 1983. I went outside while the eye was overhead, which was incredibly eerie. Having experienced so many things so young, I never really felt in danger until I was about 10 on Dent Island when an incident involving the SS Oriana cruise ship occurred. It ran aground on a reef near Hook Island and my father decided to go and investigate in our small dinghy. We arrived as high tide approached and the ship was able to float off. We accompanied the ship on its journey travelling in the same direction we needed to return home. We pulled into the boat port and my father climbed the cliff to lower the winch to lift the dinghy out of the water. I remained in the boat to fix the winch hook to the cables. Unfortunately, before my father could lower the hook totally, the wake of the SS Oriana arrived and violently swept me and the dinghy out to sea. I barely survived the experience being thrown about inside the boat and holding on for dear life. I also barely survived another incident when I was 12 when a canoe turned upside down on top of me in the surf at Bondi beach while visiting family in Sydney. Fortunately, I lived to tell the tale, obviously. I moved back to Ipswich aged 11, which was quite dramatic moving to a city from an island in the middle of the Pacific. When I was 15 we decided to move to England, which was a little traumatic leaving many friends behind and starting again in another culture, where about the only thing in common was the language. I won several prizes at school for Environmental projects, but I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t learning about our beautiful planet. I’ve had many jobs from a young age including Rock DJ and PR Rep, eventually settling on teaching English to foreign students, which I continued when I moved to Barcelona, Spain aged 28. As a hobby in the UK, I participated in local quizzes, but due to strange circumstances I became a Quizmaster shortly after arriving in Barcelona. While I was the Assistant Quizmaster at the Philharmonic Quiz, the Quizmaster Martin Lunn, developed melanoma cancer and died soon after, RIP, leaving me in charge, and I took up the baton until the pandemic arrived. In the meantime I got married to an excellent Clinical Psychologist in 2006, and became a father in 2007 and again in 2009, which greatly changed my perspectives about many things. In 2016, I decided to become a qualified Environmental Educator through the AEEA (Spanish Association of Environmental Education) and I now dedicate my time to saving the planet, engaging in online environmental activism, writing about it, etc. The show goes on…
Health wise, my family has suffered a little: My mother died aged 60 and my father 70, and I believe air pollution greatly contributed to their early deaths from stroke and heart disease, but that said, both of them smoked. I foolishly smoked for 9 years too, before giving up. I have mild asthma, and allergies are common in my family. Here in Barcelona, I protest with “Eixample Respira” against air pollution, traffic noise, etc. I also protest against Asbestos with “Glories LLiure d’Amiant”, because of the terrible death of my uncle Trevor who used to be a builder installing materials containing Asbestos for many years, both in the forms of corrugated sheets for roofing and as insulation material. I should also mention that he was a smoker, so I suppose smoking should be on my future list of things to fight. Shortly after he retired, he started to feel a strange pain in his chest, so he got some tests done and it turns out he had lung cancer. They thought it was mesothelioma, which is a type of cancer caused by asbestos fibres which irritate the cells of the lung lining. He underwent an operation to remove the affected part of the lung and did a course of chemotherapy. All went well for a while, until he started having a similar problem in the other lung. Back to the doctor he went, same result, another operation and chemo, but this time he wasn’t so lucky. The cancer had spread. He tried everything the doctors suggested, but the medication also took its toll on his health. After nearly 8 years of fighting cancer, this burly happy builder I knew and loved was left without dignity and hope, and slowly drowned in his own rotting lung tissues. At least 100,000 people die because of Asbestos every year and it can take anywhere between 10 to 50 years to develop into cancer. I would not wish cancer on anyone, let alone lung cancer…

UPDATES
2019 – SOSquiz is alive! My blog material needed its own website, and so I thought combining it with quick environmental quizzes was a good learning idea…
UPDATE 2020: New pages and quick tests were added to the site, while coping with Covid…
UPDATE 2021: More material has been added including to already existing pages. New quizzes were made and the format has been changed to that of a brief Environmental Report…
UPDATE 2022: We have now reached 10 SOSquiz pages and tests. I was feeling inspired as a result of seeing the IPCC’s latest report issuing a code red for humanity. Good luck to us all!

CONTACT INFORMATION
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How it started

How it's going

SOSquiz Glossary of Terms (with links to Wikipedia)
6th mass extinction (Holocene Extinction)
AEEA (Asociación Española de Educación Ambiental)
ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
Bad faith
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
Carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere
Carbon Monoxide (CO)
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
Coronavirus (Covid-19 or SARS Cov-2)
Electric vehicle
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
Human impact on the environment
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Internal combustion engine (ICE)
Internet service providers (ISP)
National Security Agency (NSA)
Particulate Matter (PM 10, 2.5 & UFP)
Psychological impact of climate change
Quality of life (QOL)
Ultrafine particles (UFP)
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)
World Health Organization (WHO)
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
World Wide Web (www)