Biology · KS3 to A Level · £4.99
Biology
Key Terms
Every word a biology department teaches, Year 7 to A Level, in one A4 book. Each key stage gets its own pages: the terms grouped the way they are taught rather than alphabetically, a definition that fits on two lines, and a worked example beside almost every one. Each key stage opens on one labelled cell diagram, drawn — cells and organisation, the one structure every other band assumes a pupil can already picture — and the numbers on it appear again beside the same words in the list; a further seventeen pages carry a real drawn figure wherever a picture genuinely teaches faster than a sentence: a reflex arc, a pyramid of biomass, a Punnett square, a feedback loop, a strand of DNA. Then a page on using the words: the ones the assessment itself is written in, the false friends that mean something else in a biology classroom — a culture is not art or music, a mutation is rarely the dramatic thing fiction makes it, resistance is not electrical — the same point written weakly and then properly, and what each word becomes at the next key stage.
£4.99The whole book, Year 7 to A Level, 13 pages
- A4 PDF
- every page shown, part-blurred
- instant download
One purchase covers the school that buys it. Print it, copy it, hand it round your department. Not for passing to other schools or uploading anywhere.
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Read before publication by the serving head of that department and by senior leaders, in school.
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Schools that have bought from Empower Educators include Nottingham High School, Northampton High School GDST and Sutton Valence School.
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A pupil who knows a word is not yet using it. This book is built around that gap. The words for each key stage sit in the groups they are taught in, each with a short definition and a worked example, and a marked word is one the pupil meets again at the next key stage, so a department can see where its vocabulary carries forward and where it changes name. Every key stage opens on one labelled cell, drawn, because band one is always cells and organisation — the cell membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus and mitochondria at Key Stage 3; the distinction between a prokaryotic and a eukaryotic cell at GCSE; a plasma membrane's channel and carrier proteins at A Level — and seventeen further pages carry a real drawn figure wherever the idea is genuinely easier to see than to read: an antagonistic muscle pair, a reflex arc, a trophic pyramid narrowing upward, a Punnett square worked in full, a negative feedback loop closing on itself, two populations splitting apart as reproductive isolation opens a gap between them.
Every key stage closes on a page about using the words. The words the assessment is written in, quoted from Ofqual where they are theirs — including the rule, easy to miss, that mathematical skills must make up at least a tenth of an A Level biology assessment. The false friends: a culture is a population of microorganisms grown deliberately, not art or music; a mutation is usually nothing dramatic, whatever fiction implies; resistance is a pathogen surviving a treatment that used to kill it, not an electrical property — each a word a pupil already owns in another sense, contrasted with what it actually means here. The same point written weakly and then properly. And a table of what each habit is called at the next stage, so "describing diffusion, osmosis and active transport" at GCSE is already "explaining exchange as a surface-area-to-volume adaptation" by the time it is assessed at A Level. Nothing a board decides for itself is in it, and no diagram is traced from a real textbook figure or exam paper: every cell, every reflex arc and every pyramid was drawn for the book.
- Written to
- The DfE's science programmes of study at Key Stage 3 (September 2013, DFE-00185-2013), the Biology, Chemistry and Physics GCSE subject content (June 2015, DFE-00352-2014), and the GCE AS and A level subject content for biology, chemistry, physics and psychology (April 2014, DFE-00356-2014); GCSE and A Level also follow Ofqual's subject-level conditions, which set the assessment objectives quoted on the words-at-work pages, including the rule that mathematical skills make up at least 10% of an A Level biology assessment; 166 of 205 terms appear by name in one of those documents and the cover says so, the rest are standard biological vocabulary defined here in plain English; no awarding body is named, and nothing a board decides for itself appears in the A Level pages
- Intended for
- biology departments: printed one per pupil, kept in the front of an exercise book, or put on the wall by key stage
- Extent
- 13 pages · 12 sections
Look inside
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Contents
All 12 sections
Taken from the book’s own contents page, so the page numbers are the real ones.