Quiz RI.4: The Teeming Metropolis of You
Name:____________________________________________________ Date:________________
Vocabulary in “The Teeming Metropolis of You”
Read the text below, then give the definitions of the underlined words in questions 1-5 below.
Standard: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper).
The Teeming Metropolis of You
You are mostly not you. That is to say, 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells; they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel of the human soul as it is a complex ambulatory feeding mechanism for a methane reactor in your small intestine.
This is the kind of information microbiologists like to share at dinner parties, and you should too, especially if you can punctuate it with a belch.
It's not that our bodies aren't enormously interesting in themselves, only that they are not the whole story – not nearly. Each of us is a colonized country, a host of multitudes, a reservoir of biodiversity. Indeed, the species of bacteria living on your left hand are different from those living on your right.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, navel gazing is on the frontiers of biology and medicine, as proven by the Belly Button Biodiversity Project at North Carolina State University. They take swabs, sequence DNA, and post photographs of the resulting cultures. (Request a kit online!)
And our biota – all the living creatures in and on us – is not a set of merely passive passengers. The bacteria in our gut aid our digestion and, as we are increasingly discovering, help defend us from pathogens. There are a couple of ways of thinking about how they protect us, says Russel Vance, a University of California, Berkeley, professor studying the interactions of bacteria and the immune system. The first protection is simply by existing. ...
- Brendan Buhler (2011)
1. “microbes”
Clues: ____________________________________________________________________
Definition: _________________________________________________________________
2. “ambulatory”
Clues: ____________________________________________________________________
Definition: _________________________________________________________________
3. “navel”
Clues: ____________________________________________________________________
Definition: _________________________________________________________________
4. “biota”
Clues: ____________________________________________________________________
Definition: _________________________________________________________________
5. “pathogens”
Clues: ____________________________________________________________________
Definition: _________________________________________________________________