In Which of the Following Situations Would Speciation Be Most

question 29

Multiple Choice

In which of the following situations would speciation be most likely to occur?

• A)A population of juniper shrubs is split in two by a canyon.Every year,strong winds carry a small amount of the shrub's pollen across the canyon.
• B)Seven monkeys escape from an amusement park and zoo in South Florida.To everyone's surprise,they establish a small but viable population,coexisting successfully with humans in a partly suburban environment very different from their native African habitat.
• C)Bighorn sheep occupy mountains from Canada through Death Valley in Southern California,interbreeding all the way.The populations at the two ends of the range live in very different environments.
• D)A Japanese mollusk species whose larvae are often carried from port to port in ship bilge water now flourishes in San Francisco Bay,a busy commercial port.

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Definitions:

Variance

A statistical measurement that represents the dispersion of a dataset relative to its mean, used to quantify the spread of data points.

Regression

A statistical method for estimating the relationships among variables, often used for prediction and forecasting in finance.

Correlation Coefficient

A statistical measure that calculates the strength of the relationship between two variables, ranging from -1 to 1, where 1 indicates a perfect positive correlation and -1 indicates a perfect negative correlation.

Standard Deviation

A statistical measure that represents the dispersion or variability of a data set or investment returns, indicating how much the values in the set deviate from the mean.