Evidence: teacher key

How to Check If Something Is True, grade 9 edition, written for 9th grade. Evidence is what lets you check a claim instead of just trusting it, and a good source says where its facts came from. A faked skull, a faked eclipse test and a moved planet show how evidence can fool people and then correct them.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What is a primary source?
   • A first-hand record, like a diary or a letter from the time (answer)
   • A book that sums up other books
   • The source with the most readers
2. How was the Piltdown jaw shown to be an ape's?
   • Respected scientists voted on it
   • Tests on the bones in 1953 (answer)
   • A newspaper reported it
3. Why might scientists have been less careful about Piltdown?
   • They wanted to find the first human ancestor in England (answer)
   • They had no bones to look at
   • They had good dating methods
4. In the ice cream and drownings example, what is the confounding variable?
   • Swimming lessons
   • Ice cream
   • The hot weather (answer)
5. What makes a claim falsifiable?
   • Some possible observation could show it wrong (answer)
   • Many people believe it
   • An expert said it
6. What does the story of Pluto show about science?
   • Scientists should never change a name
   • An answer can change when there is new evidence (answer)
   • Old facts are always wrong

Words

• evidence: checkable proof
• primary: first-hand
• tertiary: collected from others
• falsifiability: can be disproved
• bias: leaning one way