A Study Guide for the Earth & Life
Through Time
Midterm I
Midterm I
is a multiple choice exam consisting of 30 questions and offered on line through
your Vista/BB account. Check your syllabus
and course materials folder for the dates it is offered.
It is an open book/open notes exam, and is timed for one hour from beginning to
end. The questions will be drawn
randomly from a pool of questions on the material covered in Weeks 1 through 4,
Lectures 1-8 and the reading. A few
questions in the pool are drawn from the same questions in the quiz pool.
The best
way to prepare for the midterm is to review your lecture topic summaries and
your quizzes, and to review the key figures in your texts and on-line reading. The
lecture topic summaries and
quizzes are a built-in study guide for this course.
If you find you need more guidance, I suggest you organize your notes,
thoughts, and study efforts around these areas:
I.
The Stratigraphic Principles
a.
What are they?
b.
Can you use them in a block diagram
style question?
c.
What is an unconformity?
d.
What is stratigraphy?
II.
Sediment Record and Fossilization
a.
How are things fossilized?
b.
What are the kinds of sedimentary
rocks?
c.
What does the grain size mean about
the energy of the environment?
III.
Ecology and Evolution
a.
What is the difference between a
community, a habitat, and a niche?
b.
What is natural selection?
Genetic drift? Mutation?
Gene Flow?
c.
What is a species?
IV.
Plate Tectonics
a.
what is the difference between the
lithosphere and the asthenosphere?
b.
What is the Earth’s core made of?
c.
What happens at convergent,
divergent, and transform fault boundaries?
d.
What are examples of
continent-continent convergent boundaries, continent-ocean convergent
boundaries, transform fault boundaries?
e.
What is sea floor spreading?
f.
Can you find a mid-ocean ridge and
a trench on a map of the ocean floor?
V.
Origin of the Earth, Moon, Solar
System
a.
What are the working hypotheses for
the age of the solar system, including Earth?
b.
What is the working hypothesis
about the origin of the Moon?
c.
What material is actually age-dated
that tells us about the age of the Earth?
VI.
Precambrian Record
a.
When did the Archean Eon occur?
b.
What was the atmosphere composed of
during the early Archean?
c.
What was the major change in the
atmosphere linked to early life?
d.
What are Banded Iron Formations
(BIFs)?
e.
What was the Ediacaran (Vendian)
fauna?