The science test runs ninety minutes and asks about thirty-four questions. Nearly every one comes attached to something you have to read — a passage, a table, a graph, or a diagram — so it is as much a test of reading carefully as of remembering facts. These quizzes are built for that. Each has a guide, two worked examples, ten questions, and a key that explains not just the right answer but why the wrong one was tempting. Nothing is timed, nothing is recorded, and you can take any of them as often as you like.
If life science is new to you, read this introduction before Quizzes 8 to 20. It covers the same ground in eleven short parts, from what life is to ecosystems, with videos and practice.
All fifty-five topics, with boxes to check as you go. Read it once before you start anything else, so you can see what is ahead and mark what you already know.
Part I · The Scientist's Toolkit
How science works, and how test questions are built. These seven pay for themselves everywhere else in the series.
- 1Reading Science
What the question is actually asking.
- 2The Scientific Method
The wheel, and the ring around it.
- 3Tables and Graphs
Four shapes, four jobs, and where the traps are kept.
- 4Diagrams and Models
Cycles, flowcharts, cross-sections, and what the key is for.
- 5Reasoning from Data
What the evidence supports, and what it only seems to.
- 6Numbers in Science
Units, measurement, notation, and formulas as recipes.
- 7Statistics and Probability
Averages that mislead, and chances that are not promises.
One page to go with Quiz 2 — the six stations of the scientific method and the ring around them. Printable, and worth keeping beside you for the rest of the series.
Part II · The Cell and the Organism
The smallest living unit, the work it does, and how it makes more of itself.
- 8What Is Life?
The features living things share, and how the parts stack up.
Worked by hand in Alive or Not?, the first Life Science room.
- 9The Cell
Cell theory, two kinds of cell, and the parts inside.
Worked by hand in Two Kinds of Cells and Made to Order, rooms two and three.
- 10The Membrane
What crosses the boundary, which way, and at what cost.
- 11Photosynthesis
Sunlight into sugar, and where the weight of a tree comes from.
- 12Cellular Respiration
Getting the energy back out, with oxygen and without.
- 13Cell Division
Two identical, or four that are half and all different.
Part III · The Human Body and Health
Your own systems, and how the body holds itself steady. One of the test's two running themes, and the part your own life gives you the most to compare against.
- 14Digestive and Excretory Systems
Nutrients in, waste out.
- 15Circulatory and Respiratory Systems
How oxygen gets from the air to a muscle.
- 16Nervous and Endocrine Systems
Fast signals and slow ones.
- 17Bones, Muscles, and Skin
The frame, what moves it, and the boundary around it.
- 18The Immune System
Keeping things out, and learning from what gets in.
- 19Homeostasis
How the body holds itself steady.
- 20Food and Health
What the body runs on, and what it is built from.
One page to go with Quiz 19 — the two shapes side by side, five worked loops, and a sorting exercise with the answers on their own sheet. Printable, and worth keeping: feedback comes back in Part VI with ecosystems and in Part IX with the earth's climate.
Still to come
Six more parts, in this order. Every topic in them is already listed on the map, so nothing here is a surprise.
- IVHeredity
- VEvolution
- VIEcosystems
- VIIChemistry
- VIIIPhysics
- IXEarth and space
Part III is now complete — seven quizzes, from digestion through to food and health. The parts above appear here as they are finished.