1.3 The Community Of Science Answer Key
Question: a formal review of an unpublished report by other scientists who specialize in the topic.
Answer: peer review
Question: a broad explanation that applies to a wide range of situations and observations and that is supported by several lines of evidence and broadly accepted by the scientific community.
Answer: theory
Question: a branch of philosophy that involves the study of good and bad, and of right and wrong; a set of moral principles or values held by a person or society.
Answer: ethics
Question: the application of ethnical standards to relationship between humans and their environment.
Answer: environmental ethics
Question: how does peer review benefit the scientific community?
Answer: it guards against fault science contaminating the literature on which all scientists rely.
Question: what happens to a scientific article that is rejected by a panel of other scientists?
Answer: scientific journals will refuse to publish it.
Question: why is the replication of results important?
Answer: a hypothesis must be tested repeatedly and those tests must produce the same results before the scientific community will accept the hypothesis.
Question: explain the following statement: “science is self-correcting.”
Answer: it means that science is a process that refines and improves itself over time.
Question: give an example of a self-correction in science.
Answer: in the 16th century, when Copernicus demonstrated that Earth is not at the center of the universe, scientists abandoned their strongly held scientific belief and accepted Copernicus’s findings.
Question: what is the difference between a hypothesis and a theory?
Answer: a hypothesis explains a fairly narrow set of phenomena; a theory is a broader explanation that applies to a wider range of situations and observations.