Laboratory Manual for Non-Majors Biology 6th Edition

Book Preface

Audience

This manual is designed for students at the college entry level and assumes that the student has no previous college biology or chemistry. The lab manual’s terminology and classification conform to that of Starr/Taggart/ Evers/Starr’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, Starr/Evers/Starr’s Biology: Concepts and Applications, and Starr/Evers/Starr’s Biology Today and Tomorrow, although you’ll find that the exercises support virtually any biology text used in an introductory course.

Features of This Edition

Updated, Relevant Exercises

As always, we strive to provide students with exciting, relevant activities, observations, and experiments that allow them to explore some of the rapidly developing areas of biological knowledge and how those relate to their daily lives.

For example, Exercise 7 (Diffusion, Osmosis, and the Functional Significance of Biological Membranes) includes a new activity relating membrane function to the consequences and treatment of cholera. Similarly, Exercise 10 (Respiration: Energy Conversion) includes an activity in which cellular respiration rates are measured as levels of students’ physical performance change. Also new in Exercise 10 is an experiment investigating the potential for different plant carbohydrate sources to be used in the production of ethanol.

Updated Taxonomy

An attempt to provide accurate systematic information is like trying to hit a moving target. As new information floods in, especially molecular information, our best understanding of taxonomic and systematic relationships sometimes seems to change daily. The taxonomy in our exercises is completely updated and reflects the most widely accepted information at the time of publication.

Streamlined

Exercises have been updated throughout to streamline procedures and to enhance student comprehension. We have simplified procedures to reduce student frustration and time needed for setup.

Inquiry Experiments and Observations and the Methods of Science

We realize that the best way to learn science is by doing science. Thus, in this edition we further emphasize hypothesis testing and scientific thinking, following the cognitive techniques whose foundations are laid in the first exercise, “The Scientific Method.”

Throughout the manual, we place more emphasis on testing predictions generated from hypotheses. We strongly believe that all biology students—both nonscience majors and science majors—benefit by repeating the logical thought processes of science.

For example, in Exercises 8 (Enzymes: Catalysts of Life) and 9 (Photosynthesis: Capture of Light Energy), students learn a simple semiquantitative technique and then employ that technique in an experiment of their own design to investigate factors that affect those processes.