Forum member, Opengangs, shares their advice on smashing those pesky long responses in HSC Biology!
As the HSC is fast approaching, there is no time to hold back when it comes to studying. But have you always caught yourself out with those 7-8 markers, because you just can’t answer those questions? I’m here to help you with this very problem! With practice and a few techniques, it’s easy to smash these sections of the paper!
Know Your Content
There’s no point in going further into preparation if you don’t know your content. These long responses are supposed to test your extensive knowledge of the concepts behind Biology, so if you don’t know how or where to start, perhaps that’s your starting point. My advice is to know your content inside and out by delving in further than you might normally go. Simply rote learning content will not yield the extensive knowledge you need in order to answer these 7-8 markers. If you’re not sure about the uses of artificial blood, Google is your friend. If you’re not sure about the significance of the experiments of Beadle and Tatum, Google is your friend.
Break Down the Marks for Long Responses
At the end of the day, these questions can be broken down into multiple short answer questions. This is where we allocate our marks, and thus, we can begin to formulate our response according to this new breakdown. Let’s use this question as an example:
Explain why the combined use of quarantine and vaccination programs is a more effective way of controlling disease than using only one of these strategies. (2016 HSC, Question 30 – 5 marks)
This question was worth 5 marks, so how do we break this question down? Well, we know that the question talks about the use of quarantine AND vaccination programs, so that’s our starting point. We then need to relate this to how they control disease.
Prevention of disease refers to the “stopping” of disease from spread. For example, a prevention from malaria could be to wear long sleeves to reduce exposure to the Anopheles female mosquito, but this is not a controlling measure.
On the other hand, controlling of disease refers to the limiting of spread of disease. I may be pedantic about these things, but it’s these minuscule pieces of information that distinguishes the best answers.
So, we can break down the marks this way. You might plan your response around getting one mark each for:
Outlining the use of quarantine
Outlining the use of vaccines
Explaining why the use of quarantine alone is not effective
Explaining why the use of vaccines alone is not effective
Justifying (with specific examples) the use of vaccinations AND quarantines
A Sample Response
From here, we just simply answer the marking guidelines using full sentences.
Sample Answer:
Quarantine refers to the isolation of an infected person from a group of people. This restricts the spread of disease as infectious diseases are only spread through the transmission from one host to another. However, this does not yield the best possible outcome when controlling disease as simply quarantining people does not guarantee that other people that have previously been in contact with the host has been infected or not. Thus, the use of quarantining alone is not the most effective way of controlling transmissible diseases, infected by pathogens.
On the other hand, vaccination refers to the injection of a weakened pathogen with the same antigen as the targeted pathogen in order to attract an immune response to the host. This allows the host to become immune to such disease, as the ability for B and T-lymphocytes to attack directly yields a faster and more effective method of combating. However, much like quarantining, vaccinations alone is not the best method in controlling disease. For a vaccination to become complete, it needs to trigger the primary response. Thus, the moments the primary responses are not activated completely means that the host is just as likely to be infected before the vaccination is in place.
A combination of both methods will produce the most effective method to control disease. This can be observed by quarantining the host so that it doesn’t continue to spread to other people, and using the vaccination to trigger the immune response. The use of a quarantine can be used along with the vaccination, so that the host cannot be affected with other incoming diseases and it helps to limit the spread of disease. This, as a result, will mean that the host is completely immune to the disease, and other people will less likely to have been affected with the disease, and thus, becomes the best strategy to controlling disease.
Practice
Now, it’s your turn. Use this guide as a scaffold to setting out your response. Start by breaking down the marks into simpler questions. You can do this by asking yourself what relevant information needs to be addressed from the question, and furthermore, how you can integrate what you know to the stimulus of the question.
Remember that it is more important being succinct and concise with answering the question than regurgitating everything onto the paper!
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