Quiz!

Read about the experiment below, then answer the following four questions using the information given and what you already know!

You are setting up an experiment in the field concerning barley yellow dwarf virus. You have created 20 plots of land and divided them into two groups of 10 plots.

	Condition A	Condition B
4 Species of plants per plot, including:	D. sanguinalis L. multiflorum S. lutescens P. gunnii	A. fatua and Three of the species from group A (randomly chosen for each plot)
# of plants per plot	24
Hours of sunlight per day	10
Water	30 minutes from a sprinkler given at 8pm each day
Nutrients	20 grams of Miracle nutrients mixed into topsoil at the beginning of the experiment
Inoculation	Aphids carrying the virus live in the area and can infect all the plots equally

After letting the plants grow in the field for 2 months, you test each plant to see if it is infected with the virus.

1. What can you learn from the results of this experiment?
A. How much water plants need to grow.
B. How many species must be present to prevent the spread of disease.
C. If the presence of A. fatua in a community will cause a change in the spread of the virus.
D. If the Presence of D. sanguinalis causes more plants in a community to be infected with the BYD virus.

2. Why does groups A get the same amount of sunlight, water, nutrients and plants as group B?
A. The experiment is made to test what effect A. fatua has on the spread of the virus. It's important to keep other conditions as similar as possible to measure only the effects of A. fatua.
B. All plants are granted the right to life, water and equal sunlight by the constitution of the United Science Foundation.
C. So the results of the experiment will tell us what effect too much water has on the spread of disease.
D. None of those factors matter to the experimnet's results, so we just made them equal to keep things simple.

3. You test all of your plants to see if they are infected with the virus. These results support which conclusion:

	Group A	Group B
Average % of plants in each plot infected with the virus	4	77

A. It doesn’t matter which species are present in a community, only a change in species richness can cause a change in the risk of a virus infection.
B. The presence of L. multiflorum in a community causes the presence of the BYD virus to decrease.
C. The presence of A. fatua in a community causes the presence of the BYD virus to increase.
D. Viruses live best in plants that get at least 10 hours of sunlight every day.

4. Do these results support or reject the hypothesis "Communities containing A. fatua (a good reservoir species) will have more individuals infected with C/BYDV than plots without A. fatua".
A. Support
B. Reject
C. Neither support nor reject

5. If you found out that your lab assistant left the sprinklers on for 1 hour each day on plots in group A, and 30 minutes each day on plots in group B. Would this change your conclusion?
A. YES! My new conclusion would be that viruses live best in drought conditions, regardless of which species are present.
B. YES! I don’t know if the water level or the community composition caused the different results for groups A and B. This experiment should be done again with equal amounts of water for each group before I draw any conclusions.
C. YES! I would conclude that the amount of water given and community composition equally affect the prevalence of the virus.
D. NO! I wasn’t testing the effect of water on the plants. My conclusion is the same as before.