Living Things
Which plant structure takes in water and minerals from the soil?
What are roots?
You flip a light switch and the light turns on. What happens to the A flashlight needs a battery and a complete path for electricity to flow. What is this complete path called?
What is a circuit?
What is a fossil?
What is preserved evidence or remains of a living thing from the past?
What is the difference between weather and climate?
Weather describes conditions over a short period; climate describes patterns over a much longer period.
A student notices that one plant is taller than another. What is this an example of?
What is an observation?
A bird has hollow bones that make its body lighter. How could this structure help the bird?
What is helping it fly?
You flip a light switch and the light turns on. What happens to the circuit?
What is the circuit closes/completes?
A scientist finds a fossilized leaf in a rock. What can the fossil tell the scientist?
What is evidence about organisms or environments from the past?
A thermometer reads 35°F in the morning and 60°F in the afternoon. What changed?
What is the temperature?
Mia thinks plants grow faster when they get more sunlight. She tests her idea. What is she testing?
What is a hypothesis/prediction?
A plant's leaves are broad and flat. What might be an advantage of this structure?
What is helping the plant capture sunlight?
Which would be more likely to conduct electricity: a metal spoon or a wooden spoon?
What is a metal spoon?
Scientists find the same type of fossil in rocks in two different places. What might this tell them?
The areas may have once had similar environments or been connected in some way.
Rain falls on a mountain and flows downhill into a stream. What force causes the water to move downhill?
What is gravity?
Three students measure how far different toy cars travel. Why should they measure each car more than once?
To get more reliable data and see whether the results are consistent.
Two animals live in the same environment. One has thick fur and the other has thin fur. Which animal would probably be better suited to a very cold environment?
What is the animal with thick fur?
You connect a battery, wires, and a light bulb, but the bulb doesn't turn on. Name one thing you could check.
The wires, battery, bulb, or whether the circuit is complete.
You find seashell fossils in rocks in an area that is now far from the ocean. What is one reasonable conclusion?
What is the area may have once been underwater or near an ocean?
A town gets very little rain for several months. What problem could this cause?
What is a drought or a shortage of water?
A student wants to find out which paper airplane design flies the farthest. What should the student measure?
What is the distance each airplane flies?
A duck has webbed feet, while an eagle has sharp talons. How are these structures useful for the animals?
Webbed feet help a duck swim, while talons help an eagle catch/grip prey.
You have two identical magnets. You put the north pole of one near the north pole of the other. What will happen?
What is they repel/push away from each other?
Which would provide better evidence about what an area looked like millions of years ago: a photograph taken yesterday or fossils found in the rocks?
What are the fossils?
Two cities have similar temperatures, but one gets much more rain throughout the year. Would you expect their climates to be exactly the same? Why or why not?
No. Precipitation is one of the factors that describes climate, so the cities have different climate patterns.
Two groups test the same question and get different results. Does this automatically mean one group did the experiment wrong?
No. They should examine their methods and data and repeat the investigation to determine why the results differed.