IHS Biology
Name: ______________________________________________
Unit 4 "What on Earth?" Final Review!
Directions: Answer the following on binder paper (not in your journal). Skip a line between Q's. Staple this page to the top.
1. List five specific ways organisms are dependent upon each other.
2. How do abiotic factors affect the life of an organism? Give three specific examples.
3. Define a population.
4. What is the carrying capacity (K) of a population? Identify an environmental factor that increases K and
one that decreases K.
5. Draw a food web for your favorite community.
6. Describe: (a) examples of decomposers, and (b) what would happen if a community lost all its
decomposers.
7. Explain why only 10% of the energy at one trophic level is available to the next higher trophic level.
8. In developing nations, what is the humanitarian advantage to people eating a plant-based diet?
9. What is bioaccumulation and why does it affect the top predators the most?
10. Describe the key processes that together make up the carbon cycle.
11. How do human activities affect (a) the carbon cycle, and (b) the nitrogen cycle?
12. What is evolution? Can an individual evolve, in the biological sense?
13. What are the roles of mutation and natural selection in evolution?
14. If we say that a horse and a donkey are different species, what does that mean?
15. What are the two requirements for speciation? Give two possible causes for each of them.
16. According to evolutionary theory, would you expect there to be more "spelling" differences between orca
whale DNA and human DNA, or between orca whale DNA and goldfish DNA? Explain.
17. How do you know who is most closely related to whom on an evolutionary tree?
18. Why is biodiversity important? Why might it be bad for us to lose a great deal of biodiversity?
“WHO DUNG IT?” LAB AND THE ELEPHANT PROJECT
19. What are restriction enzymes and what role did they play in our learning where the “ivory” originated?
20. In agarose gel electrophoresis,
a. Do DNA molecules move toward the positive or negative end of a gel, and why?
b. How is the size of a DNA fragment related to its movement through a gel?
21. How do the data in a gel photograph reveal the country in which an elephant
murdered for its ivory lived?
22. Name 4 different stakeholders in elephant ivory poaching: 2 that would oppose the
sale of ivory and 2 that would support it.
23. Why do scientists like Dr. Sam Wasser do what they do just to save elephants? Give
at least two reasons!