Questions and Answers of Essentials of Biology

Which mealworm behaviors were instinctive? Why?
Which mealworm behaviors were reflexes? Why?
What is the difference between a reflex behavior and instinctive behavior?
How did the mealworm respond to food as a stimulus? What type of behavior is displayed in the mealworm’s response to food? Why is this behavior important?
How did the mealworm respond to cold water as a stimulus? Was the response behavioral or metabolic?
Based on the results of your investigation, what conclusions can you draw about the relationship between a muscle’s workload and its threshold of stimulation?
Why would a muscle’s threshold of stimulation change as its workload changes?
Which muscles were able to contract under the greatest loads? What does this suggest about the role these muscles play in frog movement?
Describe an experiment you might perform to determine which leg muscles of a frog are important for jumping long distances?
What are some advantages of performing this experiment in a simulated environment?
Use your knowledge about the heart and the circulatory system to make a hypothesis about how the average blood pressure for a group of people is affected by manipulating the age and gender of the
How will you use the Investigation screen to test your hypothesis? What steps will you follow? What data will you record?
Analyze the results of your experiment. Explain any patterns you observed?
Did the results of your experiment support your hypothesis? Why or why not? Based on your experiment, what conclusions can you draw about the relationship between age and gender to group blood
During the course of your experiment, did you obtain any blood pressure readings that were outside the normal range for the group being tested? What did you notice on the medical charts for these
List the risk factors associated with hypertension. Based on your observations, which risk factor do you think is most closely associated with hypertension?
What effect might obesity have on blood pressure? Does obesity alone cause a person to be at risk for high blood pressure? What other factors, in combination with obesity, might increase a person’s
Explain why the menu of food choices you made is nutritious, meaning the food choices follow the government’s recommendations for Calories and nutrients?
How does a 2 000 Calorie daily menu compare to your recommended Calorie intake amount on the chart? What would you do to your 2 000 Calorie menu to make it better match your recommended Calorie
How can you use the Nutrition Facts label to make healthy decisions?
Did the menu you created contain the foods that you like to eat? Explain why or why not.
Do any of the items you selected provide more than 30% in any nutritional area? If so, which foods and which nutrients? Why did you choose those foods?
What did you notice about the nutrients in fast foods?
In what ways do normal red and white blood cells differ?
Which type of white blood cell would you expect to be most common in a normal blood smear?
A differential count of white blood cells from a patient gave the absolute number of lymphocytes as 8000 per mm3 and the total number of WBC white blood cells as 12,000 per mm3. Calculate the
Describe the difference between a communicable disease and an inherited disease. Use examples you have studied in this exploration to support your description?
Why are white blood cells in a stained blood smear usually counted at low power under a microscope? Explain your answer.
Why is the presence of a larger than normal number of neutrophils indicative of an infection? Explain your answer.
Why would you not expect to see tissue macrophages in a blood smear? Explain your answer.
Describe the characteristics of each of the animal skulls that you classified?
How do carnivore and primate skulls differ?
What can be learned by studying the dentition of various mammal skulls?
What skull features do predator animals have in common?
What skull features do prey animals have in common?
How do the various characteristics of animal skulls indicate the importance of one sense over another?
What other evidence besides fossil bones might be useful in describing the behavior of a dinosaur?
How could a paleontologist determine that a dinosaur was a plant eater or a carnivore?
What information would an artist use to reconstruct a model of a dinosaur?
Describe some features that dinosaurs share with modern living reptiles?
What evidence supports the hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs?
How could you determine that two species of dinosaurs lived in the same time period?
Describe the steps you took to identify one of the dinosaurs from the fossil?
Describe the steps you took to estimate the age of one of the fossils?
For each of the following characteristics, indicate whether the trait is common to Phylum Arthropoda or specific to certain classes of arthropods: wings, chewing mouthparts, jointed appendages,
Which of the five classes of arthropods is the most diverse? Explain.
What are some advantages and disadvantages of having an exoskeleton?
Arthropods are the most diverse group of animals. Describe some characteristics of arthropods that may have contributed to their great evolutionary success?
Many species of arachnids are predators, but they have no teeth or jaws. How do they obtain nutrients from their prey?
What characteristics distinguish an annelid from other worms?
Do earthworms have a front and a back end? Explain your answer.
Describe the difference between a closed and an open circulatory system?
What do two earthworms exchange during mating? Explain your answer.
What structure in the earthworm has a similar function as the human heart? Explain your answer.
What part of the digestive system would you see in a cross section anterior to the gizzard?
Of what value to a plant is the ability to lose water through transpiration?
Suppose you coated the leaves of a plant with petroleum jelly. How would the plants’ rate of transpiration be affected?
Which species of plants that you tested had the highest transpiration rates? Why do you think different species of plants transpire at different rates?
Did any of the environmental factors (heat, light, or wind) increase the transpiration rate more than the others? Why?
What environmental factors that you tested increased the rate of transpiration?
Describe any experimental controls used in the Investigation?
Describe the process of transpiration in vascular plants?
Why do you think the mouse was selected as a model organism for mammals? Explain your answer.
Is it possible to have a knockout mutant plant that shows no visible phenotype that is different from the wild-type plant? Explain your answer.
Why can the Arabidopsis plant serve as a model for all flowering plants? Explain your answer.
Describe how any of the plants you observed differed from each other?
According to your observations of one of the mutant plants, what function is controlled by the knocked out gene? Explain your answer.
Did any of the mutant plants show a variance in phenotypes from the wild-type plants under one of the experimental conditions? Explain your answer.
What is the definition of the concept of a species in Eubacteria based on? Explain your answer, taking into consideration that these organisms do not reproduce sexually.
Various streptococci and lactobacilli were traditionally grouped together as lactic acid bacteria because of their characteristic fermentation. Most of them were found to have a DNA Guanine plus
Is it possible that two prokaryotic organisms show phenotypic similarities, but do not share close evolutionary relatedness? Explain your answer.
Suppose you found out that organism 3 might cause pneumonia. Would this additional information strengthen or weaken your hypothesis about the identity of the organism? Explain you answer.
Describe the characteristics of the organism and the process you used to determine the identity of one of the organisms in this Exploration?
Which set of data represents a type of natural selection that stabilizes the allele frequencies of the population?
In which of the simulated environments do individuals of the genotype Aa survive best?
A population in which the frequency of alleles remains the same over generations is said to be in genetic equilibrium. Describe one mechanism by which a population’s genetic equilibrium can be
Did the effect of natural selection vary with different starting allele frequencies in identical environments? Why or why not?
Did either allele A or a disappear from the population you studied? Why or why not?
Are there any factors other than technical ones that might slow ñ or even prevent ñ the use of bioengineering?
Why is it essential that the same restriction enzyme be used to cleave (cut) the DNA of both organisms used to create a transgenic organism?
What is a ‘transgenic organism’? Give examples.
What types of vectors are used to carry DNA from one species into the DNA of another species? Give examples.
What is a plasmid? How is a plasmid used in gene splicing?
What does the term ‘sticky ends’ refer to in gene splicing?
DNA is made up of two separate strands of base sequences. The same sequence is found on both strands, but running in opposite directions. What word describes this characteristic?
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of radiotelemetry and DNA fingerprinting methods for obtaining wildlife population data?
Monarch butterfly populations are found east and west of the Rocky Mountains. How could DNA fingerprinting technology be used to establish that they constitute one breeding population or two separate
How could DNA fingerprinting technology is used to establish that a highway cutting through grizzly bear habitat stops the bears from moving from one side to the other? Explain your answer.
The police arrested three suspects and obtained DNA fingerprints from each individual. What does the investigator need to establish to determine which of the three might be the culprit in the crime?
What other problems might DNA fingerprinting of bear hair solve?
Bear hair may also be collected from trees that the bears rub against. In a study using DNA fingerprinting of hair collected from rub trees, it was found that the population in the area contained
DNA fingerprinting identifies individual bears and also allows for determining the gender of a bear. What information does it not provide that might be useful for deciding on conservation efforts?
Does changing the sequence of nucleotides always result in a different amino acid sequence? Explain.
Explain why all mutations are not necessarily harmful?
Was the sequence a result of point or frame-shift mutation?
What do you think will be the impact of this mutation? Why?
How many amino acids were changed?
Describe the differences between the original and mutated sequences?
Explain why sex-linked traits appear more often in males than in females?
Color blindness results from a sex-linked recessive allele. Determine the genotypes of the offspring that result from a cross between a color-blind male and a homozygous female who has normal vision.

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