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Biology Tutoring in Torrance

November 19th, 2015

Picture this: you’re sitting in your room trying to start your biology homework. #1- Where does cellular respiration occur in the cell?  You’re drawing a complete blank. The cytoplasm? The chloroplast? Mitochondria? What about the endoplasmic reticulum – smooth or rough? Wish you had some help? You can find great biology tutoring in Torrance here, at Study Hut Tutoring.

The cell cycles are the most challenging part of the year for many biology students. Here are all of the cycles listed in chronological order and grouped by function and location:

  1. Daytime – chloroplast (plant cell only)

Photosynthesis (thylakoid)

Calvin cycle (stroma)

  1. Nighttime (aerobic – with oxygen) – mitochondria

Glycolysis (cytoplasm)

Krebs/Citric Acid cycle (matrix of mitochondria)

Electron Transport Chain (inner membrane of mitochondria)

  1. Nighttime (anaerobic – without oxygen) – cytoplasm

Glycolysis (cytoplasm)

Fermentation (cytoplasm)

BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PICTURE BELOW, try this on your own: draw a big rectangle. Inside the rectangle, draw a chloroplast (circle with smaller circles inside of it), then draw a mitochondria (jelly bean-shaped oval with a squiggle inside of it). Now try to place all of the cycles above on the drawing, connected by arrows. If you can, add some important inputs/outputs of each cycle (H2O, CO2, O2, ATP, sunlight, glucose, etc). Does it look something like this?

 

Biology Tutoring in Torrance

 

1) During the day, the plant

– uses the chloroplast to make ATP (via photosynthesis) and

– glucose (Calvin cycle) to store up energy.

2) At night, the plant will take the glucose it made during the day (via Calvin cycle) and

– break it down (glycolysis) to

– make energy (Krebs/ETC).

3) If the plant does not have access to oxygen, it will do

– glycolysis and

– fermentation (instead of Krebs and ETC).

Need someone to help you draw it? Look no further. Biology tutoring in Torrance is easy to find, affordable, and easy to schedule. Within minutes of calling, you’ll be able to schedule one of our many experienced tutors for a one-on-one tutoring session to help you with that tough bio homework or study for an upcoming test.

Newport Biology Tutor

November 3rd, 2015

Are you having trouble in biology? Do terms like thylakoid, carbon fixation, meiosis, and apoptosis sound like gibberish to you? Don’t worry! We can help.

Here are 5 useful resources our Newport biology tutors have found that can help!

  1. If it’s photosynthesis that is giving you tons of issues, this is an easy-to-read and thorough study sheet put together by a Newport Biology Tutor from the Study Hut team. It covers everything from terms to structures to processes.
  2. Biology is a very visual subject. It is all about processes that are happening all around you, and even within you. Reading about it in a dry science textbook robs it of this vivacity. This website, CellsAlive, has some great animations that give these concepts life. Check out this animation of mitosis: http://www.cellsalive.com/mitosis_js.htm CellsAlive also has videoes of common biological processes as they happen in real life. For example, here is a video (with some great sound effects added) of what happens to a bacterial colony when it’s invaded by a virus: http://www.cellsalive.com/phage.htm
  3. If your biology book is overwhelmingly large, and incredibly daunting, BiologyCorner has clear, concise concept maps that can help condense the information to a more manageable, bite-size morsel. It has  pictures, coloring pages like this one (don’t laugh!  They’re really helpful!) puzzles, and quizzes.
  4. If it’s not precisely the material that’s giving you issue but you just have a hard time studying, you can use things like Chegg’s free flashcard app to put those flashcards right on your phone. That way whenever you have a free second (in the car, waiting in line, as you’re falling asleep) you can run through them. Science shows that spaced repetition increases memory. If your phone is actually the problem, not the solution, you can download apps like SelfControl Freedom (free), Disconnect (free) that will lock you out of the internet or your entire phone for a certain amount of time.
  5. So maybe you’ve tried these things and it still does not make sense. We’ve been there. For some, biology is just another language. Luckily we have Newport Biology Tutors that can translate biology into a language you can understand! We can make it fun and memorable and give you the one-on-one attention you need to dominate this biology class. To make an appointment or if you just have a few questions, fill out a contact form to the right, or call us today at 949-226-1573.

Newport Biology Tutor

How to Ace Bio

May 20th, 2014

How to ace Biology class

  1. Learn Latin! No, you don’t have to be fluent, it is a “dead language” after all. But knowing your Latin roots is a valuable help. Biology is full of strange words that need to be memorized. Endotherm, hemophilia, cephalization, echinoderm, autotroph, mesoderm…the list goes on. It can get overwhelming, and you aren’t going to remember everything. The good news is that knowing your Latin roots will let you “fake” your way through words you’ve never seen before, and remember words that you probably knew a while ago. Take echinoderm. If you know that “echino” means spiny, and “derm” means skin, you know you are talking about something with spiny skin. What has spiny skin? Sea urchins! Echinoderms are members of the sea urchin family, including sea stars and sea cucumbers. How about autotroph? Well, “auto” means self, and “troph” means food. Self food…what organisms make their own food? Plants! Now you can avoid being bogged down in big scary looking words, even if you have never seen them before.
  2. Pretty colors. Biology involves more than writing. You need to be able to recognize images and figures, as a lot of biological learning comes across visually. Would you rather explain what a cell looks like with words or with a picture? A picture is usually much easier to understand. This is where the colors come in. When you are labeling and drawing figures for different biological concepts, try to use different colors for the different pieces. This will help the image stick in your mind, and differentiate between the important parts. When you think back to remember the image on a test, it will be much easier to remember what “the purple part” of the cell was rather than the gray part in a gray picture. Color coding your flashcards works the same way; the color will help the word stick in your memory and your recall will be faster.
  3. Repetition. Let’s face it, biology takes a lot of memorization, more than most subjects. You are going to have to sit down and memorize the process of cellular respiration, the different amino acids, the phylogeny of birds. The fastest and most reliable way to do this is to write down the info. Then write it again. And again, and again, and again until it becomes easy. Physically writing down information you have to know can really cement that info in your long term memory, especially for things that aren’t pictures, but just words or names you have to know. Instead of passively looking at a textbook page, fill up pages with the Krebs cycle if you need to, or the reactions of photosynthesis, or the structure of amino acids. By test time writing the whole thing down will be second nature, and getting an A will be a piece of cake.