CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL AS & A LEVEL BIOLOGY: WORKBOOK

Exam-style questions and sample answers have been written by the authors. In examinations, the way marks are awarded
may be different.

Workbook answers
Chapter 19
Exercise 19.1 Choosing the Exercise 19.2 Gene technology
right tools to analyse data terminology
1 a The most useful statistical test would be 1 a restriction endonuclease
the t-test. You would need to measure
the yield from about 20 individual plants b Taq polymerase
of each type, keeping all other variables c DNA ligase
(e.g. water availability, light intensity and
duration, soil nutrients) the same. Your d reverse transcriptase
data for each type of plant should show e promoter
an approximately normal distribution.
Your null hypothesis would be that there f primer
is no significant difference between the
g recombinant
yield of GM and non-GM plants.
h microarray

You could also calculate standard
deviation for each set of data, and i gel electrophoresis
standard error.
j gene therapy
b You could calculate the species diversity
using Simpson’s Index. k polymerase chain reaction (PCR)

c You could use the Hardy–Weinberg

equations. You want to know the
frequency of heterozygotes, which is
represented by 2pq. The percentage of
children born with the condition gives you
the value of q2. From this, you can first
work out q, then p and then 2pq.
d You could use the chi-squared test. Your
null hypothesis would be that there is
no difference between the observed and
expected results.
e You would use the Lincoln index.
f You would calculate standard deviation
for each set of data, and then standard
error. You could plot a bar chart with
error bars, representing 2 × SE above and
below the calculated mean. If the error
bars for the two sets of data overlap,
this suggests that the true means of each
population may not be different.

1 Cambridge International AS & A Level Biology – Jones & Parkin © Cambridge University Press 2020