What Is Life? A Guide to Biology with Physiology

Fifth Edition

Publication Date: July 19, 2021

Paperback ISBN: 9781319383770

Pages: 992

Prompting students to question how they encounter biology in their daily lives.

Available for the first time with Achieve, What is Life? teaches students to ask the questions they need to understand how biology plays out in their daily lives. The rigorously updated fifth edition brings forward the features that made the book a classroom favorite (chapters anchored...

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ISBN: 9781319389819
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ISBN: 9781319383787
What Is Life? A Guide to Biology with Physiology

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ISBN: 9781319383770
What Is Life? A Guide to Biology with Physiology

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ISBN: 9781319390402
What Is Life? A Guide to Biology with Physiology 5e & Achieve 5e (2-Term Access; International Edition)

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Part 1 The Facts of Life

Part 2 Genetics, Evolution, and Behavior

Part 3 Evolution and the Diversity of Life

Part 4 Ecology and the Environment

Part 5 Plant Life

Part 6 Health and Physiology

This edition has a strong focus on the relevance of biology in students daily lives.
Special features such as ‘Q Questions’ to spark student interest and encourage critical thinking, ‘StreetBio’ and‘This is How we do it’ help students learn to think like scientists.
Brief Sections Make the Material Manageable for students.
Vivid Photos Capture the Story of Biology.
Clear and Consistent Illustrations together with the conversational writing style threads fascinating, relevant, contemporary examples of the science throughout each chapter for maximum student engagement. The author also expertly uses analogies and interesting examples to get students to care about biology.

Achieve is Macmillan Learning’s complete online learning system. It houses instructor resources to support teaching and a range of interactive resources and the full eBook to help students succeed in their course. Access to Achieve for instructors is available on this page. Student access to Achieve could be through their institution if the institution has signed a license or as a separate student purchase. The instructor must set up a course for students to benefit from this product.

The design of the text has been completely updated to be modern, cleaner, and easier for students to interact with.
All chapters were streamlined for clarity and brevity, reducing overall length of the book by 76 pages.
The photography program has been completely updated and modernized.
Statistics and examples have all been updated throughout the text.
Each This Is How We Do It feature (one per chapter) has a Think, Pair, Share activity added. In addition, the Take Home Message was re-cast to summarize the particular aspect of the process of science that the feature presented.

Jay Phelan

Jay Phelan teaches biology at UCLA, where he has taught introductory biology in large lectures for majors and nonmajors for fifteen years. He received his PhD in evolutionary biology from Harvard in 1995, and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Yale and UCLA. His primary area of research is evolutionary genetics, and his original research has been published in Evolution, Experimental Gerontology, and the Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology, among others. His research has been featured on Nightline, CNN, the BBC, and NPR; in Science Times and Elle; and in more than a hundred newspapers. He is the recipient of more than a dozen teaching awards.  With Terry Burnham, Jay is the coauthor of the international best-seller Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food—Taming Our Primal Instincts. Written for the general reader, Mean Genes explains in simple terms how knowledge of the genetic basis of human nature can empower individuals to lead more satisfying lives. Writing for a nonscientific audience has honed Phelan’s writing style to one that is casual and inviting to students but also scientifically precise.

Achieve for What is Life? 5e is an online learning system backed by extensive development and research. Proven to increase student engagement and boost performance. Achieve offers:

Access to the ebook to download, read and virtually annotate for a completely flexible experience.
Course and book-specific resources including adaptive quizzing to personalize the experience for students.
A grade book, assignable assessments with targeted feedback, insights and reporting, instructor resources - all with seamless integration options.
Integrated with iClicker so that instructors and students can benefit in class and remotely from an industry leading student response system.
Simulation activities focus on the most challenging concepts in a non-majors biology course. These scaffolded, interactive lessons help students apply the principles they learned from the text or lecture in the context of a relevant "real life" question or familiar scenario.
Tutorials give students an opportunity to work through a concept step-by-step, with support through visuals, hints, feedback, and links to the ebook. The tutorials can be assigned standalone, but they were also developed as a way to prepare students for the simulations.
Animations are embedded directly with associated assessment problems to help students easily access these powerful visualization tools as they work through their assignments. These animations are also available to instructors in Powerpoint slides for use in the classroom.

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About Achieve

Achieve is our online learning system backed by extensive development and research, proven to increase student engagement and boost performance. Achieve offers:

Access to the ebook to download, read and virtually annotate for a completely flexible experience.
Course and book-specific resources. Most Achieve courses come our LearningCurve, our adaptive quizzing engine with personalized question sets and clear feedback based on each student’s correct and incorrect answers.
A grade book, assignable assessments with targeted feedback, insights and reporting, instructor resources - all with seamless integration options.

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