What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0654 Co-ordinated Sciences papers and filtered to variation and selection. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
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What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on variation and selection, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Calling a characteristic with distinct categories continuous, or one with a range discontinuous.
- Saying continuous variation is caused by the environment alone.
- Saying organisms pass on features they acquired during their lives.
- Saying the environment causes the mutation that is needed, rather than selecting one that already existed.
- Saying an individual evolves. Populations evolve as allele frequencies change.
- Calling antibiotic resistance artificial selection or selective breeding.
- Saying bacteria "learn" or "become immune" to an antibiotic.
- Confusing natural and artificial selection in either direction, when the only test needed is whether a human chose.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Variation and selection revision notes.