Biology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The spider is the animal in which the female may kill the male after mating.

It is best known in the black widow and in some orb-weavers. The male is much the smaller, and the meal helps the female provision her eggs; males of several species have evolved elaborate strategies to escape.

Answer: D

Biological control means checking one pest by another organism.

A natural enemy - a predator, parasite or pathogen - is introduced against the pest. The ladybird beetle against aphids and Bacillus thuringiensis against caterpillars are examples; it avoids the residues and resistance that chemicals bring.

Answer: A

Plants grow chiefly by the addition of cells.

Meristems at the shoot and root tips and in the cambium divide continuously, and the new cells then enlarge and differentiate. Cell enlargement contributes, but only division can go on indefinitely, which is why plants grow throughout life.

Answer: D

The five kingdom classification was proposed by R.H. Whittaker in 1969.

His kingdoms are Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae and Animalia, separated by cell structure, body organisation and mode of nutrition. It replaced the older two-kingdom scheme, which forced bacteria and fungi into the plant kingdom.

Answer: B

The heart is made of cardiac muscle.

Its fibres are striated like skeletal muscle but branched, uninucleate and joined end to end by intercalated discs, which let the impulse pass from cell to cell so the whole wall contracts as one. It is involuntary and never tires.

Answer: B

The study of the causes of disease is etiology, from the Greek aitia, cause.

It identifies the agent, whether infective, genetic, nutritional or environmental. Pathology, by contrast, studies the changes the disease produces in the tissues.

Answer: C

The plantain is a perennial herb.

It has no woody tissue at all: what looks like a trunk is a pseudostem of tightly rolled leaf bases, and the true stem is the underground rhizome. It is the largest herbaceous flowering plant.

Answer: B

Insect-pollinated flowers have pollen that is rough and sticky, often with spines or a sticky coating, so it clings to a visiting insect.

Wind-pollinated pollen is the opposite: small, smooth, dry and light, produced in enormous quantity so that a little of it reaches a stigma by chance.

Answer: A

Aristotle is called the father of biology.

He was the first to observe and classify living things systematically, dissecting animals and describing their structure, habits and development, and his arrangement of the animal kingdom stood for nearly two thousand years.

Answer: A

Organisms living only on plant material are herbivorous.

Cattle, deer, rabbits and most insects are herbivores. They occupy the first consumer level of the food chain, and many depend on gut micro-organisms to digest the cellulose no animal enzyme can break down.