Environmental Science Semester 1 Exam

Environmental science can be described as interdisciplinary because it ____.

• allows for a rigorous study of the environment

• includes topics that are not explored in other disciplines

• includes biology, chemistry, geology, social sciences, and the humanities

• is rapidly evolving over time into a different form of science

Which resource would best be categorized as inexhaustible?

• oil reserves

• coal reserves

• solar energy

• forests

About 80% of the world’s human population live in ____.

• nations with high average income per person

• the United States, Japan, Australia, and Germany

• environmentally sustainable societies

• less-developed countries

Tags

NGSS.MS-ESS3-4

Oil is a(n) ____.

• nonrenewable resource because it cannot be formed on human time scales

• renewable resource because it can be renewed through geologic processes

• inexhaustible resource because it is a form of stored solar energy

• ecosystem service because oil is a valuable commodity sold in the marketplace

About 900 million people live in extreme poverty, struggling to live on the equivalent of less than ____ a day.

• $1.25

• $5.00

• $7.00

• $10.50

Point sources of pollution ____.

• enter ecosystems from dispersed and often hard-to-identify sources

• include runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from farmlands and suburban lawns

• are easier to identify than nonpoint sources of pollution

• are more difficult to control than nonpoint sources of pollution

Narrative: (for question 7)

A tiny, tawny-colored butterfly called the Carson Wandering Skipper was always known for its small and very localized populations. Typically, it was found along the western Nevada and eastern California high desert areas. It was always located close to hot springs and other wet areas that supported salt grass, the host plant it depended on.

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Recently, the populations went into a steep decline, and a last hold-out area was threatened by imminent construction of a freeway bypass. Biologists became alarmed and began an intensive search for populations in locations other than the spot designated for the freeway bypass. They began their search by identifying all known locations of hot springs, in hopes of finding small populations of the Carson Wandering Skipper close by.

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The biologists’ observations that the Carson Wandering Skipper populations had declined is an example of ____.

• reporting a conclusion

• identifying a problem

• performing an experiment

• proposing a hypothesis

Tags

NGSS.MS-LS2-4

Scientific hypotheses differ from scientific theories in that scientific hypotheses are ____.

• Widely accepted description of observations in nature

• possible, but not yet well-tested, explanations of data

• not able to be tested

• arrived at after extensive mathematical modeling

A scientific law ____.

• is a hypothesis that has been proven by repeated experiments

• is what a theory becomes when it passes experimental tests

• is a change in nature that has consequences when it is broken

• is a well-tested and widely accepted description of what we find happening repeatedly and in the same way in nature

Tags

NGSS.HS-PS2-1

Energy can be generally defined as the ____.

• velocity of any moving object

• heat generated by atoms losing electrons

• capacity to do work

• transfer of heat from the sun to Earth

Tags

NGSS.MS-PS3-5