Question

1. Many of the terms involving cells have a similar word form in them: prokaryote, eukaryote, and karyotype for example. Try to find out why (what the root word is and where it comes from), and report your findings here. Why do you think the root word is contained in all these words?

Answer 1

To answer this question we need to decompose each word so we can find where is the part that relates these words.

The three words have a greek root, as we can see:

Prokaryote: Pro= before, Karyon= nucleus

Eukaryote: Eu= New, after, Karyon= nucleus

Karyotype= Karion, Typos=Type

So prokaryotes are cells without nuclei and evolutive speaking are older than eukaryotes. Eukaryotes on the other hand possess a nucleus and are more recent than prokaryotes. A karyotype is the count and pairing of chromosomes of a eukaryotic organism.

In conclusion: all three words are related to the presence/absence of the nucleus and are related to their evolutive history.