90 minutes on the official test
GED Science Practice
GED Science rewards reading skill as much as science knowledge. Most questions hand you a passage, a chart, or an experiment description and ask what it supports. This page gives you a 30-question practice test plus drills for each content area.
Take Practice Test 1 — 30 questionsTopic drills
What the science test covers
The Science test runs 90 minutes and draws from three areas: life science at about 40 percent, physical science at about 40 percent, and earth and space science at about 20 percent. Life science means cells, genetics, evolution, human body systems, and ecosystems. Physical science means energy, motion and forces, atoms, chemical reactions, and waves. Earth and space covers weather, plate tectonics, the water cycle, natural resources, and the solar system.
Two themes run through everything: human health and living systems, and energy and related systems. If you notice a question could be about either biology or physics, it is usually built around one of those two themes.
The test is a reading test in a lab coat
A large share of GED science questions are answerable from the stimulus in front of you. You will be shown a graph of population over time, or a short description of an experiment, and asked which conclusion is supported. The trap answers are almost always statements that are true in general but not supported by that specific data.
This is why memorizing facts has limited returns. What pays is practicing the move from evidence to conclusion: identifying the independent and dependent variable, spotting what was held constant, and refusing to accept a claim the data does not actually show.
The vocabulary you do need
There is a short list of terms worth knowing cold because questions are built on them: hypothesis, variable, control, producer and consumer, photosynthesis and respiration, dominant and recessive, kinetic and potential energy, conduction and convection, and renewable versus nonrenewable. Everything else can usually be reasoned out from context.
There are also two calculation types that appear reliably: speed as distance over time, and simple percentage or ratio work drawn from a data table. Neither requires anything beyond GED math.
Frequently asked questions
- What score do I need to pass GED Science?
- 145 out of 200 passes. 165 is reported as College Ready and 175 or higher can earn college credit at participating institutions.
- How long is the GED Science test?
- 90 minutes with about 34 questions, and no scheduled break.
- Do I need to memorize the periodic table?
- No. Questions that involve the periodic table supply the information you need to read from it.