Part 3: Read the passages below and answer the questions by citing textual evidence. During the California Gold Rush of 1849, the world's supply of gold more than doubled, and hundreds of thousands of people
rushed to California to find their share. Boomtowns popped up to accommodate the visitors. A boomtown is a community that
receives sudden and explosive growth and development. San Francisco had around two-hundred residents in 1846, and about
36,000 in 1852. The few merchants in these boomtowns sold goods for more than ten times what they cost back East. For
example, a single pound of flour sold for as much as $17. Not everyone who joined in the California Gold Rush got rich, but
most of the boomtown merchants did.
1)
Why were boomtown merchants able to sell their products for so much money?
a) How do you know this?
2) How were the miners able to pay such steep prices for the goods offered by Boomtown merchants?
a) How do you know this?

Bisphenol a (often called bpa) is a chemical found in products that people use every day, from water bottles to food containers to children's toys. unfortunately, bpa leaches out of its many products and makes its way into our bodies. what are the health effects of bpa exposure? ongoing research is finding that elevated exposure to bpa can affect a wide variety of developmental and physiological processes, but one of the first studies of bpa's health effects came about because of a simple mistake in the lab. at a laboratory at case western reserve university in 1998, geneticist patricia hunt was making a routine check of her female lab mice. as she extracted and examined developing eggs from the ovaries, she began to wonder what had gone wrong. she noticed that many of the eggs showed problems with their chromosomes, and some had irregular amounts of genetic material, which can lead to miscarriages and birth defects in mammals. she learned that a lab assistant had mistakenly washed the plastic mouse cages and water bottles with a harsh soap, releasing bpa from the plastic. knowing that bpa is an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that can enter organisms and mimic hormones, hunt set out to discover whether it had adversely affected her mice.

Which of the following factors would not contribute to allopatric speciation? a) a population becomes geographically isolated from the parent population.b) the separated population is small, and genetic drift occurs.c) the isolated population is exposed to different selection pressures than the ancestral population.d) different mutations begin to distinguish the gene pools of the separated populations.e) gene flow between the two populations is extensive.

In general, did the simulated mice align with your predictions from the punnett squares? yes or no?