What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9700 Biology papers and filtered to classification, biodiversity and conservation. 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 classification, biodiversity and conservation, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Defining a species as organisms that can interbreed, leaving out that the offspring must be fertile.
- Saying the biological species concept works for all organisms. It fails for asexual species and for fossils.
- Placing Archaea and Bacteria together as one group because both are prokaryotes. The domain system separates them.
- Saying fungi are plants that cannot photosynthesise, rather than giving chitin walls, saprotrophic nutrition and glycogen storage.
- Treating viruses as members of a kingdom or domain.
- Describing biodiversity as the number of species only, and leaving out relative abundance and genetic diversity.
- Using a transect where the question requires random sampling, or randomly sampling across a gradient that the transect exists to reveal.
- Forgetting the assumptions of mark-release-recapture, particularly that the marked animals must mix back in.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Classification, biodiversity and conservation revision notes.