ok if we are going to talk about questions that are flawed but are in tests:
what is hotter, boiling water, or steam?
talk it over and i'll give you the answer in a day.
It depends on your definition of steam and boiling water, however scientifically, boiling water is hotter, because it is producing gaseous water. Steam, or the common definition of it, is mostly water vapor or liquid water suspend in the air and gaseous water, but it is decreasing in temperature, so it has to be cooler than boiling water.
Steam would have to be hotter. If it were cooler, then it wouldn't be steam, it would be sub-boiling water, possibly dissolved in the air. Assuming the air pressure is one atmosphere, and the water is undiluted, the water will only get up to 100 degrees celcius, after that the energy absorbed goes into the phase change. You're then left with steam at 100 degrees, assuming the energy being dumped into the water also gets into the steam, that would leave the steam marginally hotter than the water, but it has significantly more energy than the water regardless of that.
If it's a trick question, you're probably right. Ugh, it's too fucking ambiguous, and depends on whatever particular interpretation was going through the head of the person that wrote it. Shit like that on tests always pisses me off, when a question is ambiguous, wholly subjective, or both. Fortunately, I have a tendency to guess which of the right answers the writer was thinking...