My Science Textbook Page: Fill & Download for Free

I think it was when I shouted out the answer to three questions asked in a quiz competition for 6th grade kids.I was 6 years old and in Grade 2 at the time :DIn three separate questions, they asked for the expansion of DDT, TNT and the name of the substance that is vital for the process of photosynthesis.The contestants could not answer and the question was asked to the audience. I was one of the first to shout out the answer :DYeah, little Miss Hermione Granger :PBackground story…Our science textbooks used to look very fancy those days. It had small lessons followed by three or four pages of exercises consisting of ‘fill in the blanks’ and ‘match the right answers’, etc. based on the lesson. My parents used to buy me these textbooks from the local bookstore. I used to read them and answer the questions after the lesson. I was always hungry for books and science books were super exciting for me. So by the time I was in Grade 2, I had already read and finished the exercises for the science textbooks for grades 3,4, 5 and 6. I didn’t know the meaning of DDT or TNT, but I knew their full forms correctly. And I knew all about chlorophyll too ^_^Even the Principal cheered for me that day. Never felt so proud about anything before or after that incident.

A limitation we all face in writing science textbooks is space—word count, page count, room for tables, art, and photos. When I went from my 8th edition to my 9th, for example, I couldn’t make it any more than 5 pages longer—yet how much significant new science in this field do you think emerged in the three years since the previous one? As author, you love your science and there’s so much cool stuff you want to talk about (like I do in Quora), yet to make a publishable book, you just can’t. You have to sigh and let it go. No room.Say there’s something new and important, like CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing or stem-cell therapy. How much space do you think it would take to explain that so a 19-year-old nursing student will understand it and see its clinical relevance? A quarter page, a column, a full page? If I add even a meager quarter page of 20 lines or so, 10–12 words per line (hardly enough to explain such a topic), I have to find an equivalent amount of older to delete somewhere else in that chapter—maybe text, maybe a quarter-page illustration.If I go three lines over in a chapter, it can add not one page but 16 pages to a bound book, because books are printed and bound in “signatures” of a minimum of 16 pages each when the paper off the big press is folded, bound, and trimmed. You can’t add just 1 or 2 or 3 pages to a book; you add them in multiples of 16.So a lot of the writing process is an exercise in word count and other mechanics—balancing the importance of a new illustration or bit of text against what it’s going to do to page breaks, chapter lengths, and book length. Sometimes I even have to think of a shorter word for something, because the longer word I’d prefer to use creates a new line in a paragraph, which moves the break between that page and the next, and maybe screws up having a piece of art and the callout to it on the same page.The space constraints on a writer also force one to simplify science, sometimes stretching the truth a bit or giving only a “first approximation to the truth” (good enough for a sophomore, you find yourself thinking). Just try to come up with a concise definition of a word as basic as gene. Almost any attempt will fail to be fully accurate. So after nearly a quarter page of discussing how the meaning of gene has changed since Mendel’s hereditary “factors,” I confess to being able to define it only approximately:So when reading any textbook, you have to keep in mind you may not be reading what the author wishes he or she could have said; what might have been more accurate if the author had more room to explain it. You’re often reading just first approximations to the truth. Then later maybe you go to graduate school or professional school and learn how much of what you were taught as an undergraduate or as a high-school student just wasn’t quite correct.

In Grade Eight, I had a science teacher whom everyone hated. His lessons were boring and long-winded, and he was just a terrible teacher in general. Let’s call him Mr. Sid.One lesson he was talking about friction and used the age-old example of the two books. You know, the one where you flip two pages of a books together so you can’t pull them apart. Unfortunately, he chose two floppy, large science books as the poor subjects of this experiment and passed it around the class, daring us to try and pull it apart. No one could, and all the time a smug smile grew on his face as he was proved right again and again and again.Then, it was my turn- at least, that of my desk partner and I (we sat in pairs). We each took a side and pulled, not with very much force since we weren’t really expecting it to work.Mr. Sid was already starting to comment on how it was ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to pull the two books apart because FRICTION when we started pulling.Then, the books slide apart, and my desk partner and I are each left holding the side of a floppy science textbook. The entire class explodes like Mount Vesuvius on Pompeii, and Mr. Sid looked like he was about to faint from the shock. It was amazing.