Your Friend Is Trying to Learn About How to Kill

question 42

Multiple Choice

Your friend is trying to learn about how to kill bacteria. She reads that preservatives such as citric acid are added to foods because the acidic environment kills bacteria by denaturing their proteins. She thinks this sounds like a lot of scientific jargon and asks you what it means. How can you explain it in simpler terms?

• A)Denaturing their proteins means that the proteins in bacteria are converted into carbohydrates.
• B)The acid causes the cells to swell and burst open, also known as denaturation.
• C)Denaturing means that the proteins of the bacteria lose their structure and can't function, so the bacteria die.
• D)Denaturing refers to the fact that the bacterial cells divide too quickly and die.

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Definitions:

Social Interaction

The process by which individuals act and react in relation to others, influencing and being influenced by the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts of one another.

Primacy Effect

The tendency to recall the first items in a sequence more readily than the middle items.

Overall Impression

The sum of thoughts, feelings, or attitudes someone forms about an entity (person, place, or thing) based on comprehensive or general observation.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to attribute one’s successes to dispositional causes and one’s failures to situational causes.