The title of book 6 is "Exploring Earth's History" and its another foray into geology (oh joy!!!)
After a brief introduction in chapter one, chapter two looks at geological time and stratigraphic columns.
Chapter three is a bit of a mixture. It starts off looking at fossils (there are some copies in the home kit for us to look at) and then goes into radioactive half-lives as a method of dating rocks.
Chapter four looks at igneous rocks (a couple of examples are in the home kit), how they form and how various minerals are concentrated in them.
Chapter five looks at sedimentary rocks (again a couple of examples are in the home kit), how the various sediments are laid down and how the rock is subsequently formed.
Predictably, chapter six looks at metamorphic rocks (yes we have a couple in the kit), their formation and deformation. This chapter also sums up the previous three chapters by introducing the rock cycle.
Chapter seven takes a look at the geology of the British Isles and chapter eight looks at human evolution and how it was affected by geological events.
I didn't find this book too heavy going, it was certainly easier than Book 5. I think it helped that I had attended SXR103 before studying it and so had some understanding of the processes involved.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
S104 Book 5
The title of this book is Life.
It starts off asking the question, "What is life?" and gives an introduction to reproduction, metabolism and population levels.
The book then moves on to consider diversity and the classification of species into domains and phyla.
Next we got a look at cells, their classification, structure and diversity as well as mitosis/meosis and both asexual and sexual reproduction.
Chapter five is an introduction to biochemistry. It explains polysaccharides, nucleic acids, enzymes and proteins in some detail.
We then look at how energy is created (photosynthesis) and used in metabolic processes in some depth.
The idea of energy utilisation is then extended from an individual to an ecosystem in chapter seven.
Chapter eight introduces genetic variation and inheritance as well as another look at meosis.
Chapter nine continues the variation theme by looking at genes and how they can become mutated.
The subject of genes is continued in chapter ten by looking at DNA and how errors can creep in.
Chapter eleven looks at how DNA is used in creating polypeptides and the genetic code.
There is another look at genetic mutation in chapter twelve.
Chapter thirteen looked at various genomes, as well as the projects to sequence the genomes of various creatures.
Chapter fourteen looks at Darwin's work on evolution and natural selection.
The final chapter, fifteen, looks at human evolution.
I found this to be a very long book and struggled to remain motivated through it. The TMA helped me consolidate my understanding of some of the topics covered (I know more about photosynthesis then I ever wanted to know) but it was still a slog.
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