• Intended use- These questions have been designed to get students to think about and review the more important ideas presented in the plant biology section of Biology 230.

• Sign-in required- The user name and password will be given in class or by your GSI.

  See also special notes below regarding modem access.

• Printing- We recommend that you print out this advice document and review it before you start the tutorial units and again after you have some experience with it.

  We do not recommend printing out the tutorial units. If you print the tutorial units, you will lose the hypertext capability, and you will get huge paper copies with a lot of blank space due to the spacing we have had to insert between questions and answers.

• How to use this tutorial-To get the full benefit from this tutorial, it is necessary for you to pose the questions and answer them in your own mind, not just read the questions and answers. You must think through each question and the corresponding answer options before you look at the answers/explanations given.

  For each question, try to formulate an answer to the question before reading the answer choices. Next, try to pick the best answer by clicking on the highlighted portion of the question. A response with an explanation will appear. Then, look at the explanations for the other answers; all of them will provide instruction.

  Use the links, do not scroll.

• The order of topics-The order of the groups of questions (i.e., units) follows the order of the lectures in Biology 230, Fall Term 1999. You may access the tutorial beginning with any unit.

  Unless you are instructed otherwise, you can skip the topics not covered in lecture.

• Your role-You will find these exercises more useful after attending the lecture and reading the relevant chapters of the book. However, you are advised to use the Tutorial within a day or two after the relevant lectures if possible, i.e., not to fall behind. You may find it useful to have your text handy to look up terms that are unfamiliar.

• The types of questions-These questions are designed to be used as a tutorial rather than a test. This frees us from a number of constraints imposed on exams. For example, more than one answer or even no answers may be correct. Likewise, some questions may be true/false, short answer or thought-provoking essay type questions (which would could to be continued in class discussions). Moreover, some of the questions are worded in convoluted ways that promote careful thinking, but they would make poor exam questions

• Images-Many of the questions in this tutorial use images to enhance student learning. The images surrounded by a blue or red border (highlighted) can be enlarged to view details by clicking once on the image. After viewing the enlarged image, return to the tutorial by clicking the BACK button at the top of the window, or by clicking on the box at the upper left corner of the image window to close the image window.

• Clearing the after-link colors- If someone before you has used your computer to work the PBT, you may wish to clear the after-link colors shown by your Web browser. To do this in Netscape 4+, proceed to Options on you toolbar, then to Edit, Preferences, Followed by Clear history and finally click on Expire Now.

• Problems- If your computer says you do not have enough memory to run this program, please see a consultant at the Campus Computing Site or call 4HELP. Basically, if your computer can run Netscape 3 or above, you should be able to run the PBT as we designed it to run. Sometimes, the memory in the computers at the Campus Computing Sites gets filled up or the programs get disorganized during the course of a day and the programs have to be reloaded.

  If you have trouble with several links to answers, e.g., you are kicked back to the start of the unit rather than going to an answer, you may have a the defective download program. To correct this, you need to reload the PBT replacing the defective copy stored in your computer's memory. In Netscape, there should be a RELOAD button on the second tool bar down from the top.

  Usually, web browsers have a moving symbol to indicate that downloading is continuing; in Netscape, this is a box with an N located in the upper right of your screen. If you try to use the tutorial before the downloading has been completed, the download will stop, you will have an incomplete program and many links will not work, see description and repair procedure above.

• Modem access- If you access this tutorial through a modem, it may take a while (sometimes several minutes) to download into your computer. Some students who use a modem to access this tutorial have reported that they can disconnect their phone connection once the download is complete. This will save your ITD connect time allotment.

  You can access the PBT through any of the UM dial in phone numbers or even through commercial online services, but you must sign in through a UM server. Access is restricted to the UM domain.

  If you wish to access the PBT directly rather than going through the Bio 230 home page, you can use use the folowing URL:

  http://www.biology.lsa.umich.edu/~ldnum/pbt/

• Warning re waiting until the last minute- We advise you to keep up and not to wait until the last minute to use the tutorial for academic reasons but also because the Campus Computing Sites can get very crowded at certain times during the term. In addition, the Biology Dept. server/network where this tutorial is housed has occasionally crashed for several days, so it may not be available in the last minutes before an exam.

• Feedback- We need your help. Please keep in mind that this tutorial is "under construction," so your feedback is essential to improving this tutorial. If you find defective links, errors in the questions/answers, etc., please let us know via the comment forms, but do remember to identify the question in your communication. Whether or not someone will be able to answer any questions you submit by e-mail will depend on whether or arrangements have been made to provide a virtual GSI during that term.

Some of the questions in this tutorial were modified from Life: Science of Biology, 3rd ed. (1992) or 4th ed. (1995) by W. K. Purves, G. H. Orians, and H. C. Heller. Complete citation information is available. Some questions are used from old Biology 154 exams written by a variety of faculty, and many have been composed specifically for this tutorial.