CFE Higher biology - practice paper book

Is anybody doing cfe higher biology on Wednesday and have the practice paper book? I have it and seem to be getting quite a few answers wrong and I can't see why...I think there are a lot of wrong answers in the answer section and wanted to discuss answers with other people who have the book :smile:

Reply 1

kitten999

2

Original post by sweatpea_98

Is anybody doing cfe higher biology on Wednesday and have the practice paper book? I have it and seem to be getting quite a few answers wrong and I can't see why...I think there are a lot of wrong answers in the answer section and wanted to discuss answers with other people who have the book :smile:

My daughter been doing this today and wece noticed some mistakes too. Question with a diagram about plasmids is has answers that dont match!

Reply 2

Gwenuin

8

I found a few mistakes in these papers, I will post them all and hopefully it might be useful for other people. Also there were a few other questionable marks from questions the SQA would never ask.

Model Paper 1:
9ai) Identify the life cycle stage which is least affected by a rise in temperature from 20C to 25C. They answered larval stage, but actually all stages apart from first nymph stage were unaffected, so there were three answers for that. Also on the key on that graph they forgot to shade in first nymph stage which is a little confusing :frown:

9cii) Calculate the average time... They answered 12.2 days, (not sure how they got that) the correct answer was 11.6 days. (add up all the values from the 25C section on the graph, + the average time spent as an adult before first egg laid value from the table)

Model Paper 2:
2a) Name the non-coding regions of eukaryotic genes. They answered exons, this is just straight up wrong, the correct answer is of course introns.

10a) The plasmid diagram had the wrong letters, though if you replaced P, Q, R and S with A, B C, and D, you get their answer which was B and D. The correct answer is Q and S.

13b(v) A typo, they said "stereotype" instead of stereotypy. This made me chuckle :biggrin:

Finally also, not really a mistake, but in paper 2 question 4b, they ask you to read two numbers off a phylogenetic tree, and do a calculation with it, to get 73 million years. This is not really possible because the scale was not marked at intervals that specific, it went up in tens. You had to be able to tell that the two speciation events marked on occured at values more precise than the scale measured, impossible to precisely do, as from the graph we assume it was only plotted to the nearest 10. SQA usually ask these questions on graph paper where we can see easily what the numbers are, so this shouldn't happen tomorrow.

If you guys have any Qs about these papers just quote me or something, I usually only drop 2 or 3 marks... (although not taking biology next year XD)

Reply 3

sweatpea_98

OP

2

Original post by Gwenuin

I found a few mistakes in these papers, I will post them all and hopefully it might be useful for other people. Also there were a few other questionable marks from questions the SQA would never ask.

Model Paper 1:
9ai) Identify the life cycle stage which is least affected by a rise in temperature from 20C to 25C. They answered larval stage, but actually all stages apart from first nymph stage were unaffected, so there were three answers for that. Also on the key on that graph they forgot to shade in first nymph stage which is a little confusing :frown:

9cii) Calculate the average time... They answered 12.2 days, (not sure how they got that) the correct answer was 11.6 days. (add up all the values from the 25C section on the graph, + the average time spent as an adult before first egg laid value from the table)

Model Paper 2:
2a) Name the non-coding regions of eukaryotic genes. They answered exons, this is just straight up wrong, the correct answer is of course introns.

10a) The plasmid diagram had the wrong letters, though if you replaced P, Q, R and S with A, B C, and D, you get their answer which was B and D. The correct answer is Q and S.

13b(v) A typo, they said "stereotype" instead of stereotypy. This made me chuckle :biggrin:

Finally also, not really a mistake, but in paper 2 question 4b, they ask you to read two numbers off a phylogenetic tree, and do a calculation with it, to get 73 million years. This is not really possible because the scale was not marked at intervals that specific, it went up in tens. You had to be able to tell that the two speciation events marked on occured at values more precise than the scale measured, impossible to precisely do, as from the graph we assume it was only plotted to the nearest 10. SQA usually ask these questions on graph paper where we can see easily what the numbers are, so this shouldn't happen tomorrow.

If you guys have any Qs about these papers just quote me or something, I usually only drop 2 or 3 marks... (although not taking biology next year XD)

Yes I agree with all those mistakes :smile:

I'm sure there are more but I can't remember them. There is a question (5a) on the model paper 3 which I don't really understand but also I'm not sure if the answers are correct :/ so if you could help explain that it would be great :smile:

thanks

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Reply 4

Gwenuin

8

I am just doing that paper now, I will explain it in an hour or so probably :smile:

Reply 5

Gwenuin

8

Okay so the answers at the back have the following:

5a(i) A,D (ii) B, H (iii) F, G (iv) F, G

I think these are all correct apart from ai) which is definitely wrong, oxygen is not a product of respiration, but water is so a(i) A, C

Also I had originally said Oxygen was a hydrogen carrier in (ii) because it is the "final electron acceptor" but it also accepts hydrogen, (it carries hydrogen away from the ETC..?) This the kind of ambiguity that SQA avoid in the final papers, they would rephrase something like that to be clear.

Don't know if that was the only problem you had, if it wasn't, PM me if you need any more help

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