Biology Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Cobra venom attacks the nervous system.

It is neurotoxic: the toxins block the acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction, so the muscles cannot be made to contract and the victim dies of respiratory paralysis. Viper venom, by contrast, is haemotoxic and attacks blood and tissue.

Answer: A

Night blindness is caused by a lack of vitamin A.

Vitamin A is needed to make rhodopsin, the pigment of the rod cells that gives vision in dim light. Prolonged deficiency dries the cornea and can end in blindness; it remains a major cause of childhood blindness worldwide.

Answer: B

Myopia is short-sightedness.

The eyeball is too long or the lens too strong, so light focuses in front of the retina and distant objects blur while near ones are clear. It is corrected with a concave lens.

Answer: B

Mycology is the study of fungi, from the Greek mykes, mushroom.

Fungi are neither plants nor animals but a kingdom of their own, with chitin cell walls and heterotrophic nutrition by absorption. Phycology covers algae and bacteriology bacteria.

Answer: A

Cirrhosis affects the liver.

Long-continued injury - from alcohol, hepatitis B or C, or fatty liver - replaces the working tissue with scar tissue, so the organ hardens and shrinks and its functions fail. The change is irreversible.

Answer: A

The scientific method is not a rigid set of logical steps.

It involves a suspicion of what the truth might be, an educated guess, and a great deal of imagination and insight. The textbook sequence of steps is a simplification of what scientists actually do.

Answer: D

The study of fruit is pomology, from the Latin pomum, fruit.

It covers the cultivation, breeding and storage of fruit crops. Anthology in this sense is the study of flowers and spermology of seeds.

Answer: D

Gregor Mendel is called the father of genetics.

His experiments on garden peas, published in 1866, established that inheritance works through discrete factors that segregate and assort independently. The work was ignored until 1900, when three botanists rediscovered it.

Answer: B

Summer sleep is aestivation, from the Latin aestas, summer.

Animals pass the hot dry season in a dormant state with lowered metabolism - lungfish, snails and some frogs bury themselves until the rains. Hibernation is the winter equivalent.

Answer: C

The scientific name of cotton is Gossypium herbaceum.

It is one of four cultivated cotton species. Azadirachta indica is neem, Phaseolus aureus the green gram and Ficus benghalensis the banyan.