Name:
Disease Detectives Study Guide
1. Describe how to find each of the following vital signs:
a. Blood pressure
b. Heart Rate/Pulse
c. Temperature
d. Respiratory Rate
2. A middle school student was outside playing basketball for gym. Explain what would happen to
their vital signs.
3. Stella thinks that if people are exposed to ultraviolet light then they are more likely to get skin
cancer. Stella designs an experiment wherein sample A consisted of people were exposed to
ultraviolet light and sample B was not.
a. Control Groupb. Independent variable –
c. Dependent variable –
4. Experiment 1
A group of students performed an experiment to see whether doing jumping jacks for two
minutes would increase their blood pressure. They had five students perform jumping jacks for
two minutes and then measured their blood pressure. They repeated the experiment three
times. They analyzed their results, and since the blood pressure measurements were all above
the normal values you’d expect, they concluded that doing jumping jacks does increase blood
pressure.
a. What was wrong with Experiment 1?
5. Describe three ways to prevent contamination of your sample when working with bacteria.
6. For each microorganism describe what it is, how it reproduces, if it can mutate, and using the
disease dictionary 1-3 illnesses it can cause.
What it is
Reproduction
Mutations?
Examples
Fungus
Bacteria
Virus
7. Below are the “lab results” of a patient for campylobacter. Does the patient have
campylobacter? Explain
8. Look at the left. A patient comes in with a
cough, fatigue, chills, stuff nose and body aches.
Which illness do they most likely have? What
would you need to do to know for sure?