Based on your findings, which theory about alien thickness seems most valid or most accurate?

Seventh-grade science students with flexible ethics: you’ve come to the right place!

Every so often I look at the search terms that led people to this blog. Most of them are what you would expect, but one of the top search terms, one that keeps showing up again and again and again, is “based on your findings, which theory about alien thickness seems most valid or most accurate?”

I feel like at some point I must have mentioned the words “aliens” and “theory” or “thickness” together by accident, and that started it off. Then at one point I commented on it, just wrote a paragraph on how weird it was that I keep getting these alien thickness people, and since that caused the entire phrase to be on my blog in one piece, it opened the floodgates and now I can’t stop getting curious alien thickness theorists.

So today I finally decided to figure out what was going on, and Google led me a 7th grade science class at Madisonville Junior High School, Los Angeles. As best I can tell, this class’s teacher gives her students a homework assignment that includes various questions on genetics and ecology, most of which make sense.

[EDIT: or it may be a national/statewide curriculum, which only that teacher has put online. That would explain the large number of search terms better than a single class would]

But on question 25, it suddenly jumps to a question about alien thickness which is completely inexplicable by the terms of everything that has come before:

25. Based on your findings, which theory about alien thickness seems most valid or most accurate?
A. Alien thickness is mainly affected by sunlight. The thickness may be used as a way to shield out the sunlight.
B. Alien thickness is mainly affected by temperature. This may be because aliens become dehydrated (lose water) at higher temperatures and become thinner.
C. Alien thickness is mainly affected by temperature. The greater thickness at lower temperatures may be used as a way to stay warmer in colder weather.
D. Alien thickness seems to change at random. It does not seem to be affected

Although there are a few other questions that deal with a changing population of thick and thin aliens, none of them give any information on sunlight, temperature, or hydration status. So I’m not surprised that what, by the numbers, has to be every single student in her class decides to Google the question to try to find the answer online.

I looked around myself and eventually found this web gizmo, where you adjust water, temperature, and sunlight to a group of little aliens and it tells you about their changing phenotypes. This has got to be the source of the test question, but it’s not mentioned on the test and judging by student confusion they don’t know about it. Maybe it’s mentioned in class one day and then it ends up on a worksheet a month later and nobody remembers it anymore? In any case, dozens of students keep entering it into Google and ending up at my blog.

And this is bad because the blog entries where I mention how weird it is that I’m getting all these alien thickness people also mention lots of things that are really really inappropriate for seventh graders, yet likely seventh-graders are finding them through alien-thickness-motivated confusion. So my new plan is to direct them all here, to answer their question, and let them go on their way and maybe finish their homework a little quicker. I don’t feel bad about this since any question that gets an entire class trying to cheat en masse must be pretty flawed and since homework is mostly bad for kids anyway.

So, seventh-graders! Still with me? Let’s talk alien thickness!

Start by going to the gizmo and adjust the different sliders from lowest to highest one-at-a-time, while watching the bar graph measuring alien thickness. You will notice that adjusting the water slider from highest to lowest doesn’t change thickness. Likewise, adjusting the sunlight slider from highest to lowest doesn’t change thickness. But adjusting the temperature slider while holding the other two constant does change thickness. So we conclude that thickness probably depends on temperature.

So now we can eliminate all the answers except B and C, the ones that say that alien thickness is affected by temperature. How do we distinguish between these two?

Well, B says that temperature only affects aliens indirectly, through its effect on dehydration. But if that were true, we would expect preventing the aliens from getting dehydrated to remove the effect of temperature. But this doesn’t happen – no matter how high the water slider is, moving the temperature slider still causes the aliens to shift from thick to thin. So the effect of temperature doesn’t depend on hydration.

Armed with this knowledge it should be pretty simple to pick the correct answer through process of elimination.

Let’s move on to question 26:

26. Based on the data you found, about how many of the 100 aliens would become thin if the temperature were 35°C?
A. fewer than 10
B. about 50
C. about 80
D. more than 90

You notice that at temperature 20 degrees, about fifty aliens are thin. At 25, about seventy aliens are thin. And at 30, about eighty-eight aliens are thin. The take-home point is that the higher the temperature, the more aliens we expect to be thin. So at 35 degrees, we would expect more aliens to be thin than the eighty-eight who are thin at 30 degrees. Which option best reflects that expectation?

So there’s your answer. But there’s a more important meta-point here. Your teacher wouldn’t include a nonsensical question on the worksheet, so clearly in 26 she expects you to be able to calculate alien thickness based on temperature. So just by reading 26, you know the answer to 25 is one that says thickness is based on temperature. So you can eliminate A and D and be left with a 50% chance of getting it right. And without looking at the original data, you can conclude that it’s probably not B, since it says only temperature matters but the explanation implies that water and hydration status matter as well. So really, even if your teacher forgot to link you to the gizmo thing, you should be able to guess the right answer based on test-taking skills alone.

A story from my own life – my first month of medical residency, my schedule was extremely disorganized and I ended up starting a class they day they were having their final exam. This exam happened to be on the treatment of radioactivity-related injuries, a field of medicine I was unaware existed until that moment. Because of inconsistent answers, clues in other questions, and basic common sense, I was able to guess well and ended up getting a B- (the class average was a C).

My point is, test-taking skills matter.

I haven’t gotten any Google search queries asking about any of the other questions, so I’m going to assume you’ve got all of those down. Good job, seventh-grade science students!