Critical Thinking Activities - Chapter 25


Question 1. Suppose that an average student weighs 100 pounds. He or she was born at probably near to seven pounds. Where did the extra 93 pounds come from, and minimally how much food had to be eaten to produce those new tissues?

Question 2. China is a very crowded country, with about the same land mass as the U.S. but with five times more people and less farmland. Therefore, there is much effort placed on intensive cultivation of crops to feed people, and any loss of grain to competitors is a threat to the population. During the "Great Leap Forward" it was observed that songbirds occasionally ate kernels of rice or millet from the drying floors. The population was pressed into decimating the songbird populations to save this source of human food. Why was this effort counterproductive and contributed to the resulting famine?


Answers are available to instructors in the Instructor's Manual.

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