How to Approach A level Biology Graph and Table Questions: Tips and Exam Question Pack

Get top marks when analysing figures, tables and images by avoiding common mistakes that students make

This article contains key vocabulary, a strategy for how to approach questions for success, a multichoice quiz with answers, and a big pack of past paper exam questions

Don’t panic, it’s only a graph

The single best exam tip for graphs and tables exam questions is to start by looking at the graph or chart itself. DO NOT LOOK AT THE QUESTIONS FIRST! This single thing will help you avoid the most common mistakes that students make.

But you also need to know what you’re doing. Which means you’ll need to be confident with these terms:

Background Knowledge / Vocabulary:

• Independent Variable: The variable that you purposefully set to different values during the experiment

• Dependent Variable: The variable that you measure during the experiment, which is unknown until it is measured

• Replicate: Experimental data is often replicated - the same data point is recorded multiple times for the same conditions

• Accuracy / Precision: Accuracy is how close the replicated values are to the correct value, and precision is how close they are to each other. If there is an unknown problem with the experiment, results can be very precise but have very low accuracy.

• Range / Standard Deviation: The amount of variation in the data. A large range or standard deviation means that the replicated data had a broad range of results. A small range or standard deviation means they were much more similar in value. Range / Standard deviation is therefore a measure of precision.

• Trend: What is the general relationship between the dependent and independent variables? When the experimenter increased the independent variable, what happened to the dependent variable? What shape is the graph?
  

How to Approach the Question:

1. Look at the graph or chart first!
Too many students look at the question first, get confused or panicky about what it is asking, and form preconceptions about what data they need. This then means they are then unable to look at the data clearly, and miss the information they actually need. Looking at the graph or chart first both makes the data easier to understand, and makes it easier to work out what the question is asking.

Trust me, this is a major factor in student success. If you only take away one thing from this article, always look at the graph or chart first.

2. Don’t panic if it’s about something totally unfamiliar
Students can get very thrown if the question is about an organism or molecule that they have never heard of before (the exam boards do this a lot). This sudden panic makes it hard to think clearly.

Remember - if you have covered all the course material, even if the question is about something weird and new then all the information you need will be in the data. The things that look scary are just surface details. If the question was “Fred gave James two apples, how many apples does James have” you wouldn’t need to know who these people were to answer the question.

But don’t just dive in to the details of the data …

What’s going on here?

3. Understand the format
Don’t waste time looking at the actual dots or numbers until you understand how the data has been presented. Check every aspect methodically. It’s too easy to make assumptions based on previous graph/table formats you have seen - this one might be different!

• Look at the headings / axis labels and units. What is the data showing?

• Identify the independent variable and the dependent variable. If possible, it’s helpful to label them “IV” and “DV”.

• What type of data is shown? Is it averages? Does it include a Range or Standard Deviation?

• Graphs: Check the axis labels. Have they plotted rate or time, mass/volume or concentration? Often students assume enzyme graphs have rate on the y axis - but sometimes they don’t!

• Tables: Check: is the Independent Variable in the first column? Is the data in each row consistent?
  
  

4. Look at the data
Now you understand its context, look at the actual dots or lines or numbers. Check:

• Does the Range overwhelm differences in values: Do the range bars or standard deviation bars overlap? If they do, then there is significant overlap between the populations of replicated results that were used to calculated the average values.

• Unspecified Ranges: If there are replicates but no range bars or standard deviation has been calculated, how broad does the range look when you compare the replicated data values to their mean?

• Trends: What trends can you observe? Then think about what principle of biology is being shown by the the trends.

Now think about what it all actually means:

• Values: How would you explain the highest value, the lowest value, the point at which the line crosses the x axis,

• Range: How would you explain the largest range? How would you change the method to reduce the spread in the data?
  
  

5. Ok - NOW look at the actual questions
Try to see past the detail. How does this data/question relate to things you have studied?

Your working memory can easily get overloaded with details, making it hard to think. If the examiners have introduced a new organism, its name won’t be important. What might be important is the environment in which it lives, or its interactions with other organisms. You know what data you have, and what the questions are, so pick out what actually matters here. Is this a question about enyme reaction rates? Or about surface area to volume ratio?

This is why it’s useful to look at the data first - you will be able to look at it with a clear eye, making it easier to pick out how it’s relevant to the material you have studied.

6. Give the required information
Avoid the common mistakes that lose students marks:

• If they say you should use the data, you must either quote it, or show how you have used in in a calculation

• Refer to the axis/data labels wherever possible. Don’t say “the graph goes up”, do say “the saturation of haemoglobin increases”

A-Level Biology Past Paper Graphs and Charts Exam Questions:

Got all that? Ok! Here are some questions for you to practice.

And remember - don’t read the questions until after you have made sense of the graph or chart.

This article was written by Dr Jenny Shipway with guidance and editing from Tom. Tom has over 26 years experience specialising in A level Biology teaching and tuition, and has helped many students achieve top grades in the subject.

How to Revise A Level Biology: Learn the Language

A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.

The Language of Science

Words, Words, Words

One of the reasons I love biology is the wonderful language that comes with it. But learning so much new vocabularly can be a real challenge. And yes you’re going to need to learn it - both to understand the exam questions, and to communicate your answers clearly.

It helps - a lot - to use scientific language as much as possible from the very start of your studies. It might feel awkward, but fight the urge to slide into everyday speech for comfort, or to fudge the syllables of complex words. Consciously use scientific language so that it becomes a habit. And whenever possible, speak words out loud - the muscle memory will help you remember them. Using scientific language will require you to properly organise your thoughts, so being able to do this is also a great check that you really do understand a concept.

And it’s not just about remembering scientific words (although I have some tips for that below) - you will also need to know the words the examiners will use to describe what you have to do to get full marks.

Command Words

These are the words that will communicate what you need to do in exam questions. Fully understanding them will ensure you focus your efforts on the right things. However much accurate and interesting information you write down, if it’s not what the examiner was looking for then you won’t get the marks.

When you read an exam question, look out for words like these:

• Evaluate: judge using available evidence

• Show: provide structured evidence to reach a conclusion

• Deduce: draw conclusions from the evidence provided

Find a list of useful command words here

Scientific Vocabulary

Communication is a core concept of science, and that communication has to be as clear as possible. There are a lot of scientific words that can help you achieve this clarity. But only if you use them correctly.

For example:

• Accuracy / Precision: in academia, accuracy and precision are very different things. Accuracy is how close the values are to the correct value, and precision is how close they are to each other.

• Repeatable / Reproducible: in science, “repeatable” means the experiment has been repeated by the same experimenter using the same equipment, and the same results were obtained. “Reproducable” means the same results are still obtained when the experiment is run by a different person, or using different equipment/techniques.

FInd a list of useful scientific vocabulary here

Jargon

Some molecules and processes have really complicated names. But they are not just random letters - they have coded meaning. When you see a new word, or need to remember one, look at it carefully and see how it breaks down. Most long biological words are constructed from coded fragments stuck together.

For example, “carbonic anhydrase” is “carbon” + “ic” + “an” + “hydr” + “ase”. What does this molecule do? Look below if you’re stuck.

Important prefixes and suffixes:

• a- / an- : prefix meaning “not”. As seen in words like abiotic, anhydrase, and asexual. The “an” version is used when it goes in front of a vowel or h.

• bio- : prefix meaning it’s about something living. As seen in words like biology, biochemical, biotechnology, biotic, and biomass.

• cardi[o]- : prefix meaning it’s about the heart. As seen in cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary, cardiac.

• cyto- : prefix meaning it’s about cells. As seen in cytoplasm, [endo/exo]cytosis, cytokinesis, cytokines.

• endo- / exo- : prefixes meaning “inside / outside”. As seen in endoskeleton vs. exoskeleton; endotherm vs. exotherm; endocytosis vs. exocytosis; and endocrine vs. exocrine.

• extra- : prefix meaning “outside / beyond”. As seen in extracellular, extraordinary.

• glyco- : prefix meaning it’s something to do with glucose. As seen in glycolysis, glycosidic, glycogen, glycolipid and more.

• hetero- / homo- : prefixes meaning “different / the same”. As seen in heterotrophic, homologous.

• hydr : prefix relating to hydrogen or water. As seen in carbohydrate, hydrostatic, and carbonic anhydrase.

• hyper- / hypo- : prefixes meaning “over / under”. As seen in hyperglycemia, hypothalamus and many more words.

• -ase : suffix often use for enzyme names. As seen in amylase, polymerase, helicase, ligase, lactase and many more.

• -in : suffix often used for protein names, no matter their function. As seen in actin, myosin, insulin, and opsonin. But keep your wits about you: not all “-in”s are proteins, for example penicillin is not.

• -ic : suffix meaning “relating to”. As seen in abiotic, polymorphic, metabolic, antibiotic, genetic and many more.

• -ose : suffix often used in the names of sugars. As seen in glucose, fructose and ribose. Complex carbohydrates sometimes use it - cellolose does, but starch and glycogen do not.

• -some : suffix meaning “body” (ie a lump of stuff). These names are often given to things that have been spotted by use of a microscope. As seen in ribosome and chromosome. Also very often used for spheres of cell membrane: eg lysosome, acrosome and phagosome.

• mono- : means one. As seen in monomer; monosaccheride, mononucleotide, monogenic,

• di- : means two. As seen in dimer; dipeptide, dihydrogen oxide (water!), and many other words. But of course other words just happen to start “di-” and so you have to look at the rest of the word to be sure.

• tri- : means three. As seen in trimer, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and others.

  [there are other ones for higher numbers, but they are used less often]

• poly- : prefix meaning many. A polymer is something made of repeated units stuck together (one unit is a monomer, two are a dimer, etc). As seen in polypeptide, polysaccharide, and polynucleotide. Also in words like polymorphic.

There are huge numbers of these word fragments - this list just contains some of the most important for A level Biology. Try to spot them as you go along - this will make it easier to remember the names of new process and molecules by relating them to their function. And maybe consider building up a bank of flashcards to help get them really stuck in your memory. If you can master these, learning new scientific jargon will be a lot easier.

Most importantly, make sure you’re not skipping over the middle bits of these words! Can you spell them from start to end? This will be a lot easier if you think about their entire structure, rather than just the beginning and end. Remember you won’t get the mark if you mess up the middle.

This is one of the reasons that speaking these words out loud helps - your brain might lie to you that you remember the middle bit, but speaking it out loud (without looking at the spelling!) is a great check for this.

How to Revise A Level Biology: Keep Forgetting Things? Don't Despair!

A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.

The Art of Forgetting

Your brain is amazing

It’s frustrating when we forget things we want to remember, but this isn’t a failure of our brains - it’s an important feature. Remembering everything would cause all sorts of problems, so our brain spends a lot of time forgetting things. What colour coat was the first person to pass you on the street today wearing? How many bites did you take during lunch? What did your Year 5 teacher say on the third day of class?

Unfortunately perhaps, we can’t consciously tell our brains what to remember. So sometimes it forgets things we want to recall - like the internal structure of the kidney, or how oxygen dissociation curves work. We can’t tell it to remember anything, but we can encourage it to remember by giving it sigals that this stuff is important.

So how does the brain choose what to remember? There are a variety of signals that can flag things up as worth remembering, including:

1. Information that links nicely to prior knowledge
2. Information that connects to things the brain has already decided are important

Pay attention to the links between a new topic and things you’ve learned before. And make sure they agree - if there is a conflict your brain is more likely to forget (also it means there is something you don’t understand which needs re-studying!). If you previously learned that every human cell has a nucleus, but then read that red blood cells do not have a nucleus, take the time to work out how that can be, or you’re likely to forget the new information.

Information that connects to yourself - like a topic you had to present to the class, a question you answered during a lesson, or something that you can relate to your own body - is particularly likely to be remembered.

3. Information that has proven itself to be useful

Test your recall - if you remember the information successfully and this feels like an achievement, your brain will take note. Brains love feelings of success and are always eager for more. Even better, use the information to successfully solve a problem. Brains LOVE that.

In biology you have the added benefit of having stories about health. The brain is always keen to remember information from stories that could help you avoid future harm. Emotional/personal stories of people with medical problems that were (or could have been) overcome with a little biological knowledge are high priority for the brain.

Putting on your auntie’s hat and trying to ride your next door neighbour’s unicycle is a valid study strategy

4. Information gained during/after novel experiences

In a study, children remembered a lesson better if they had an unexpected music lesson just beforehand. (If the music lesson was expected, they did not remember so much.) How much novelty is required to get this memory boost is sadly unknown, but you could try studying in different places, or wearing something unusual, or trying a new activity beforehand? At least it gives you the excuse to take a break from your desk.

5. Information that satisfies your curiosity

In a study using Trivial Pursuit questions, people better remembered the facts they’d been more curious to know the answers to. Ask yourself questions as you go through a topic, get a step ahead of your learning and try to develop a curiosity for what comes next. If you don’t care, it’s going to be harder to remember. (If you lose all interest, take a break and try to ride a unicycle.)

6. Information that it receives on multiple occasions over a period of time

This one is really important. We generally forget things - even important things - bit by bit unless we think about them again. My memory of childhood holidays is largely centred around photographs, as they have reminded me of specific events over the years.

It’s totally normal to forget things the first time you learn them. And the second time. It can be frustrating to relearn things that you thought you knew, but this is just how learning works. You might feel you have made no progress after re-learning something for the third time, but that’s not true - every time you re-learn it, you will slow the rate of forgetting. Until, with enough recapping, you will fix the information in your long-term memory.

So, when you learn something, try to come back and recap it after about a week. And then again after maybe another couple of weeks. Then again after another month or so. This is called ‘spaced learning’ and it’s one of the most powerful and efficient techniques for getting stuff into your long-term memory.

Luckily for biology students, the topics are really interconnected. This means you will naturally get the chance to recall past topics when new ones relate to them, while you are thinking about all the connections.

Her brain’s still doing good stuff, so I reckon this counts as studying

Be kind to your brain

All of this learning is pretty hard work, and your brain will need some downtime to process everything behind the scenes.

Having a nap can be great for learning, but at the very least make sure you get a decent night’s sleep.

This is why last minute studying, staying up all night studying before an exam, is not recommended. Spreading your learning out over a longer period is much more efficient.

In a nutshell:

• Don’t despair when you forget something you did previously, you’ve still made progress. Trust the process!

• Every time you re-learn something, celebrate that you have moved the information one step closer to long term memory

• Taking a break to do fun, novel activities - or to have a nap - can be good for your studying

Dr Jenny Shipway
www.jennyshipway.com

How to Revise A Level Biology: Familiarity

A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.

Tricks of the Mind

The lazy brain

There's a dangerous trick your brain can play, which can fool you into using ineffective study techniques and lead to to exam-day confusion and disappointment. But you can overcome it if you know how.

You are sitting in the exam hall. The bell sounds to start the exam. You turn over the paper, read the question and smile. You confidently pick up your pen but … somehow you can’t pull up the knowledge you need. What was that word? You know you learned it, but your mind is blank.

After the exam, you talk to a friend. They tell you the word. “Aaah I knew that!!” you say. But no you didn’t; not when it mattered.

Did it really go in?

Your brain tricked you. Going through your notes before the exam, your brain seemed to be telling you that you knew all the content. However, really it was just telling you that your notes were familiar. You never asked if it could actually recall the information.

Human brains by nature like to minimise mental effort and to feel successful (it should be noted that these are features, not bugs). As a study technique, re-reading notes doesn’t strain your brain or make you feel like you’re failing in any way. You feel like you’re learning. But are you really? Is it possible to learn without making mental effort?

How to revise

In 2006, a study [1] was published comparing two groups of students, who studied some new information in two different ways. First they all had a look through the materials. Next, one set of students were asked to re-read everything, while the other set were asked to put the materials aside and write down everything they could remember. Some time later, both sets of students took an exam to see how much had stuck.

Going into the exam, the students who had had more time studying the information were more confident. They had been able to go through it a few times, so were more familiar with it. In contast, the students who had spent the second part of their time writing down what they had recalled were not so confident. They were aware that there were parts they had forgotten, and that they had been unable to recall it perfectly.

You can probably guess the exam results. Familiarity is not the same as learning, and the first set of students’ confidence was misplaced. The students who had practiced retriving the information from their memory during study time were better able to recall the same information in the exam.

Since then, many other studies have confirmed that practicing retrieval is a particularly effective way to study. It’s called the “Test Effect”. Recalling information flags it up in your brain as being worthwhile remembering for future use. Testing what you can recall even out-performs open-book mind-mapping; in a 2021 study [2] of biology studying techniques, mind-mapping wasn’t found to add anything to the boost students got from retrieval practice.

Keep the faith

Gravity will draw the knowledge down into the brain. Maybe.

Retrieval is hard work and it can be frustrating or demoralising if you can’t remember everything you expected to. But it’s a fantastic way to learn content properly. Be reassured that the brain-ache you experience during retrieval is the feeling of effective learning. And if you can’t remember as much as you expected? You’ve been tricked by familiarity. But it’s great that you discovered this now, rather than in the exam.

So give it a try: after you revise a topic, put your books aside and just write down everything you can remember. See if your expectation matches reality. And when you can’t remember everything, you can still reassure your uncomfortable brain that it’s done a great job.

In a nutshell:

• Practicing recall helps you know for sure what you don’t know

• Practicing recall makes the information more easily remembered again in future

• When you can’t remember something, that’s not failure - you have successfully identified something for re-study

Dr Jenny Shipway
www.jennyshipway.com

References:

[1] Henry L Roediger & Jeffrey D Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Retention, Psychological Science 2006, 17(3) 249-255.

[2] Garrett M. O’Day and Jeffrey D. Karpicke, Comparing and Combining Retrieval Practice and Concept Mapping, Journal of Educational Psychology 2021, Vol. 113, No. 5, 986–997.