Topic 12: Energy and respiration (CIE A-level Biology)

Topic 12 tends to be the 1st topic to be taught in the second year of the CIE A-level Biology course and these 9 lessons are filled with a wide variety of differentiated tasks that will immediately engage and motivate the students whilst ensuring that the detailed content is covered. It is critical that students understand how energy in the form of ATP is produced by aerobic and anaerobic respiration and are able to describe the energy-driven reactions like active transport that need this input. For this reason, the lessons contain multiple understanding checks which assess the students on their current knowledge as well as checking on their ability to link to previously-covered topics.

The following specification points in topic 12 of the CIE A-level Biology specification are covered in these lessons:

• The need for energy in living organisms
• The features of ATP that make this molecule suitable as the energy currency
• Substrate-level phosphorylation in glycolysis and the Krebs cycle
• The role of the coenzymes in respiration
• The involvement of the electron transport chain that’s found in the mitochondria and chloroplast membranes in the production of ATP
• The four stages of aerobic respiration
• Glycolysis
• The link reaction
• The Krebs cycle
• Oxidative phosphorylation
• The structure of the mitochondrion
• The differences between aerobic and anaerobic respiration
• The oxygen debt

If you would like to sample the quality of these lessons, then download the roles of the coenzymes and the Krebs cycle lessons as these have been uploaded for free