The student's will have a quiz every Monday that is based on what the students learned the previous week. The questions will be based off of the study guides notes and questions, so students should take home the study guides over the weekend. This will help them to prepare for the quiz.
Special Note:
I passed back the quizzes on November 15th, 2012. There will be questions that are on the exam that were not on the quiz, but I listed the information from the quiz below so that students would know what they got wrong:
Question 1: Skeletal muscles are the voluntary muscles that allow you to laugh, and sing, and dance and play hopscotch. Cardiac muscles are the involuntary muscles in your heart that pump your blood. Smooth muscle tissue composes many of your organs and involuntarily moves things (like food) through the body.
Question 2: See below
Question 3: Paired skeletal muscles work together by contracting and relaxing. For example: when you pull a cart, your biceps contract (or flex), and your triceps relax (or extend). Together, these muscles allow you to push and pull, where alone they would only work one way.
Question 4: You volunteer to move your voluntary muscles. That means it is your choice when you move a voluntary muscle. Only you have control! J Some muscles (like your diaphragm) work with or without conscious control. So you can control your breathing, or you can take a nap and let your midbrain take over.
Question 5: On the above note, your diaphragm is what “pumps” air into and out of the body. When you pump up a basketball, you push the pump with your arms. When you pump up your lungs, your diaphragm does the heavy lifting! In this way, your diaphragm is like an air pump, but your heart is like a water pump.
Question 6: See below
Questions 2 and 7-10: Digestion is when food is broken down into a form that cells can use. The mouth breaks down some of the sugar, and then the food travels down the esophagus to the stomach.
The stomach crushes the food and breaks down the sugars and some of the proteins (more specifically amino acids), but doesn’t absorb any nutrients. The only thing the stomach absorbs is a little bit of water and alcohol. The acid in the stomach helps to further break down food, and it also kills most of the bacteria that find their way to the stomach. FUN FACT: Some of the sugar (carbohydrates) in your stomach (lactose for one) is actually digested by bacteria in the stomach!
After being adequately smashed and pummeled by the stomach, the food makes its way to the small intestine. There, the food is almost completely digested and the usable nutrients are absorbed. The main nutrients that are absorbed are fats, carbohydrates (sugars), and proteins (amino acids). The remaining food is then taken to the large intestine.
In the large intestine, the water remaining in the food is absorbed, and the waste finally makes its way into your toilet in a semi-solid form (oh poo). Remember, pee does not come from the digestive system! Fun Fact: the large intestine is also responsible for the production of some important vitamins, namely Vitamin K and some B vitamins. This is why your farts are smelly. Smelly methane gas is released as an extra product during vitamin production.
Questions 6 and 11: Blood is pumped by the heart (1 point). From the heart, the blood moves into the arteries, which carry high-oxygen blood to the body (1 point). All along the way through the body, the arteries drop off blood into capillaries [1 point] (Try to imagine the capillaries as parking lots that drop off oxygen and nutrients to the cells, that are like factories using up oxygen and nutrients and making carbon dioxide and waste). After the cells use the oxygen and nutrients, they make carbon dioxide and waste, which the veins carry back to the heart (1 point). The heart then transports the low oxygen blood through an artery (the pulmonary artery) to the lungs (1 point). In the lungs, the pulmonary artery drops off carbon dioxide and picks up oxygen. Afterwards, the pulmonary vein carries high oxygen blood back to the heart, where the cycle begins again.
If you had at least 4 of the parts and accurate descriptions for them, you got full credit. Most of the points were lost because a student didn’t read directions (like drawing the digestive or respiratory systems) or they weren’t specific enough.