Edexcel biology yesterday...how did u find it?

Thought they were pretty easyy Very happy. I needed that after U4 =/

- the siamese cat one?

Well, the torso is warm and in the question was the clue "enzyme is easily denatured", and hands, feet, tail, face are all colder parts of the body, so the enzymes in the warm part (torso) become denatured => tertiary protein structure change => active site can't bind to substrate etc => no pigment.

-The other cat one about the fact that Mm was no tail, the answer is 1/3 not 1/4, because the fourth MM wouldn't even be a cat, it would be dead. So there are 3 possible living cats, and 1 of them could be mm.

Umm.... I can't remember the rest of the paper. I chose the succession essay, and spoke about Evvvvverything to do with succession, and then how each seral stage, there is a growth in the foodchains then spoke about everything to do with energy in foodchains and stuff, then a diagram LOL just in case... And after that, water cycle, nitro cycle, carbon cycle, that this was a climactic climax community etc.

Not bad. I think I wrote about 4 pages inc the diagrams.

I didn't even want to think about the other essay as I didn't have a clue about proteins. I had sacrificed a lot of the syllabus and thank god what I sacrificed didn't come up at all..

Biology is DONE!!!!! Unless I have to resit =/

I got 25%, doesn't matter if the cat was dead or if the cat became a donkey, you had 4 samples of genotypes, 1 of them was mm, so it has to be 1/4....

I assumed that question was 1/3 as it was only talking about embryos that actually developed, and out of the four genotypes only 3 will develop, and one was the required genotype.
I did the energy flow and succession essay, which was surprisingly easy to write about, I almost ran out of time as I realised I needed a conclusion.
Generally the exam was OK though, not too much hard synoptic stuff.

I got 25%, doesn't matter if the cat was dead or if the cat became a donkey, you had 4 samples of genotypes, 1 of them was mm, so it has to be 1/4....

Biogas was a bit off-putting because I hadn't revised it the night before, but thankfully I did remember what it was about. It was acidic because of the CO2 produced but also because of short-chain fatty acids produced during acetogenesis.

Second question was a bit weird and I couldn't tell which probability they wanted - so I put both lol. I said 25% genotypic probability but since the question asks "what is the probability of a cat produced having normal tail" I said 1/3 of the cats produced will have a normal tail because the MM one will have died as an embryo and not even have developed. The pigment one I talked about the white bits being warmer etc and the tails/ears etc being far away from the body & having a large surface area:vol ratio so will lose heat more easily, so enzymes denature etc but stupidly I had forgotten the word "torso" and rambled on about the cat's "middle bit". LOL.

The metabolic pathway question was standard.

I chose the essay on plant reproduction because I thought it was more straightforward what it was asking, and I just hate hate hate ecology in every single sense so it wouldn't have made a great essay! I then rambled on about meiosis, mutations, polyploidy leading to speciation etc for the A2 content.

Alright I guess. The essays weren't as nice as previous papers' but I think it went better than Unit 5!

Chem synoptic now in about 1 hour!