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Ecology and the Environment
Jun. 21st, 2005 05:07 pmI have a distinct feeling I am never going to regain the use of my right hand. Yay, exams.
Biology came first - Module 5, Ecology and the Environment, and it was dreadful. It wasn't supposed to be, considering I had revised for it thoroughly, but it was one of those irritatingly obscure exams. Stuff they talk about in the module book for one line, and then there's a five-mark question on it. I suppose my confidence level was knocked by the fact I couldn't do the first question - it was one of those about using dry mass instead of biomass, in this case the biomass of carrot plants, and give the advantages of using dry mass. I couldn't think of a single reason. And the next bit, which was, I kid you not: "Farmers want their carrots to be uniform and all the same size. Give two ways in which this could be achieved."
Silencing the inner voice that was yelling about the rights of queer, atheist and ethnic-minority carrots, I considered writing "Use the same amount of fertiliser."
And then thought that if I write that, I don't deserve to live.
So I left it blank. There were other questions that I thought particularly painful - what effect does growing underwater have on the rate of photosynthesis? Well, I said intelligently, light levels decrease underwater. Tick off that limiting factor. However, carbon dioxide is not a limiting factor because of hydrogencarbonate ions dissolved in the water. And what is the other limiting factor on photosynthesis? It does not have an effect, I wrote. Because water is plentiful underwater.
Did I mention the not deserving to live?
There were no other total disasters of questions, although I had a moment of idiocy discussing the disadvantages of pesticides, and the last questions on the paper were about eutrophication and prokaryotes, both of which were fine. Strangely, it was the short-answer questions that caused the problem.
Afterwards, I moaned for a while and then got dragged by Fidan to sort our collective gift for Rice-Oxley. It's a crystal squirrel. This probably says everything that needs to be said. Fidan and I were waiting outside the lab for her to come out, and I was leaning against the door. While we were standing there, Fidan reminded me of something that happened a few weeks ago. Sarah had decided to stare out of the glass in the door and scare Fidan's sister I think it was, and she was waiting and waiting and while she was there she was talking to someone inside the classroom, and when she turned round, Rice-Oxley was staring through the glass at her.
At which point she screamed, jumped backwards and fell over the glass bucket.
Just as I was remembering this and laughing, still leaning against the door, Rice-Oxley opened it from the inside (definitely on purpose) with wholly predictable results. I didn't fall over the glass bucket, but it was a close-run thing.
She loved the gift and the card which we'd all signed. I'm glad she did. The class she was teaching looked on in bemusement as we left.
And then came English synoptic, and the reason I'll never regain the use of my right hand. Two and a half hours and ten sides later, I think I may safely say I'd written enough. I was right - the paper was "compare states of mind" rather than "compare insanity" - and I ended up writing way more about King Lear than I meant to. The unseen texts were a poem by Emily Dickinson and an interview about manic-depression, and neither were particularly difficult to get a handle on. I do want to have done well on this paper, as it's the one I'm supposed to be best at, but it did go okay and that's it for the English.
Biology again on Friday, more General on Thursday. I'm not worried about them, or the Chemistry - I can get enough revision done between now and then not to have to worry, so to speak. It is Politics I am going to fail with a vengeance.
In other news, there's so much fic I want to write now that I really don't have any excuse to waste time. And while I'm at it, has there been any vitriol in the Daily Mail lately? Of the gay-kiss-at-7.20pm-the-end-is-NIGH sort? That would be just the thing to cheer me up.
Not that I'm all that cranky, but you know what I mean.
Biology came first - Module 5, Ecology and the Environment, and it was dreadful. It wasn't supposed to be, considering I had revised for it thoroughly, but it was one of those irritatingly obscure exams. Stuff they talk about in the module book for one line, and then there's a five-mark question on it. I suppose my confidence level was knocked by the fact I couldn't do the first question - it was one of those about using dry mass instead of biomass, in this case the biomass of carrot plants, and give the advantages of using dry mass. I couldn't think of a single reason. And the next bit, which was, I kid you not: "Farmers want their carrots to be uniform and all the same size. Give two ways in which this could be achieved."
Silencing the inner voice that was yelling about the rights of queer, atheist and ethnic-minority carrots, I considered writing "Use the same amount of fertiliser."
And then thought that if I write that, I don't deserve to live.
So I left it blank. There were other questions that I thought particularly painful - what effect does growing underwater have on the rate of photosynthesis? Well, I said intelligently, light levels decrease underwater. Tick off that limiting factor. However, carbon dioxide is not a limiting factor because of hydrogencarbonate ions dissolved in the water. And what is the other limiting factor on photosynthesis? It does not have an effect, I wrote. Because water is plentiful underwater.
Did I mention the not deserving to live?
There were no other total disasters of questions, although I had a moment of idiocy discussing the disadvantages of pesticides, and the last questions on the paper were about eutrophication and prokaryotes, both of which were fine. Strangely, it was the short-answer questions that caused the problem.
Afterwards, I moaned for a while and then got dragged by Fidan to sort our collective gift for Rice-Oxley. It's a crystal squirrel. This probably says everything that needs to be said. Fidan and I were waiting outside the lab for her to come out, and I was leaning against the door. While we were standing there, Fidan reminded me of something that happened a few weeks ago. Sarah had decided to stare out of the glass in the door and scare Fidan's sister I think it was, and she was waiting and waiting and while she was there she was talking to someone inside the classroom, and when she turned round, Rice-Oxley was staring through the glass at her.
At which point she screamed, jumped backwards and fell over the glass bucket.
Just as I was remembering this and laughing, still leaning against the door, Rice-Oxley opened it from the inside (definitely on purpose) with wholly predictable results. I didn't fall over the glass bucket, but it was a close-run thing.
She loved the gift and the card which we'd all signed. I'm glad she did. The class she was teaching looked on in bemusement as we left.
And then came English synoptic, and the reason I'll never regain the use of my right hand. Two and a half hours and ten sides later, I think I may safely say I'd written enough. I was right - the paper was "compare states of mind" rather than "compare insanity" - and I ended up writing way more about King Lear than I meant to. The unseen texts were a poem by Emily Dickinson and an interview about manic-depression, and neither were particularly difficult to get a handle on. I do want to have done well on this paper, as it's the one I'm supposed to be best at, but it did go okay and that's it for the English.
Biology again on Friday, more General on Thursday. I'm not worried about them, or the Chemistry - I can get enough revision done between now and then not to have to worry, so to speak. It is Politics I am going to fail with a vengeance.
In other news, there's so much fic I want to write now that I really don't have any excuse to waste time. And while I'm at it, has there been any vitriol in the Daily Mail lately? Of the gay-kiss-at-7.20pm-the-end-is-NIGH sort? That would be just the thing to cheer me up.
Not that I'm all that cranky, but you know what I mean.
