I know how y’all feel about homework help, but I’m not looking for an answer to the question. I’m looking for an explanation for the question.
My brother came home from summer school today with this question:
We live in Kentucky. The only primates I see running wild are my fellow homo sapiens. I doubt Teacher wants a list of my brother’s friends…:rolleyes:
Maybe Teacher wants a list of primates that can be found at the Louisville Zoo. However, if this is the case, why would Teacher suggest using an encyclopedia? The boy has enough trouble without throwing red herrings at him.
Also, is there a primate family? I thought it was an order…
Do you have the teacher’s phone number? That sort of silliness deserves a meal-time phone call for clarification.
FWIW, here is the Britannica short list of (the Order of) Primates:
Going up from Order (Primates) to Class you get mammalia, which makes sense for a project–but you are now two ranks away from Family. Stepping down from Order (Primates) to Family (Hominidae) pretty well eliminates finding five in Tennessee or anywhere else (at least living ones).
Do you have the instructions written by the teacher?
Is there any chance your brother copied Primates as an example of one of the five Classes of mammalia that the teacher sought?
It’s on a handout. We don’t know the teacher’s number and we really don’t want to make the teacher angry with us. My brother must pass summer school.
I guess I should have mentioned this is 8th grade…
One possibility does occur to me. While Primates are clearly an Order, not a Family, there is a related order, Chiroptera. Bats are recognized by claddistic lumpers as being closely related to Primates. Even before the rise of Claddistics, the resemblance had been noted and some earlier classifications had included bats in the generally “primate” categories. (I do not remember where they were specifically inculded in the Linnaean tables.) Is it possible that the school has an older (or renegade) work on taxonomy and your brother is expected to come up with humans and four bats?
Well, I was being a bit facetious–I’d assume you were going to be polite in any conversations you initiated.
I guess I’d have your brother write up two sections:
here is a list of Tennessee critters from the Class of mammals
here is a description of Class, Order, and Family from the encyclopedia and we found “Primates family” to be confusing.
If you don’t have time to get to the library, here is a list of on-line encyclopedias. http://dir.yahoo.com/Reference/Encyclopedia/
Most of them require registration for real analysis, but a couple are free and some of the pay sites have short teaser articles for free.
We (Mom, my brother, and I) are going to go with the technically correct answer of gorrillas, chimpanzees, lemurs, orangutans and humans. We assume the Louisville Zoo has these creatures, their web page doesn’t say.
And we would be polite if we called the teacher, but our philosophy in summer school is “duck down and push through”. Mom’s already known at this school for standing up for her son. We do not need to bring more attention to him.
I keep telling Mom it’s better in high school. I hope I’m right…
And about the textbooks: they’re fairly new. You may remember hearing a while about a school that glued two pages of their new science book together. The pages mentioned the Big Bang Theory, but not creationism. That was my school. I’m slightly bitter.
