The Crowd You Carry: teacher key

Germs, grade 10 edition, written for 10th grade. Your body holds a crowd of microbes. Follow how people learned what germs do, from Pasteur, Koch, Semmelweis and Fleming to handwashing, vaccines and antibiotic resistance.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What did the NIH Human Microbiome Project study?
   • Weather patterns
   • Only the germs found in food
   • Microbes that live in and on the human body, and their roles in health and disease (answer)
2. Who was the first to prove a specific bacterium causes a specific disease?
   • Koch (answer)
   • Pasteur
   • Fleming
3. Why can resistance spread where a drug is not being used?
   • People share medicine
   • Drugs travel in the air
   • Germs pass resistance genes to other germs (answer)
4. As of November 2026, why is the best handwashing time not settled?
   • Soap stopped working
   • Most studies counted microbes removed, not how many people stayed healthy (answer)
   • Nobody has washed for 20 seconds
5. In this passage, what does the word selects mean?
   • Washes away
   • Makes smaller
   • Picks out for survival (answer)

Words

• microbiome: body's microbe community
• miasma: bad air
• anthrax: bacterial disease
• pasteurization: heat treatment
• resistance: drug immunity