የ12ኛ ክፍል ባዮሎጂ መግቢያ ፈተና፣ 2017 ዓ.ም. (2025)፣ እትም 2

Rinderpest was the cattle plague that wiped out herds across Ethiopia and the rest of Africa. Professor Tilahun Yilma, an Ethiopian veterinary microbiologist, used genetic engineering to build a vaccine on a vaccinia virus carrier, and it stayed stable in heat so it could travel to villages without a cold chain. Dr Aklilu Lemma is the tempting answer because he is the best known Ethiopian name in disease control, but his discovery was endod against the snails that carry bilharzia, not a cattle vaccine.

Dr Gebisa Ejeta is a plant breeder. He developed sorghum varieties that survive drought and resist the parasitic weed striga, which raised harvests for farmers in Ethiopia and across the Sahel, and he received the World Food Prize for that work. Dr Berhane Asfaw is the tempting choice because he is also a famous Ethiopian scientist, but his field is human fossils, not crop breeding.

Professor Yalemtsehay Mekonnen studied how the chemical pesticides sprayed on farms and flower farms affect the health of the people who handle them. Her work is in human physiology and toxicology. Professor Legesse Negash is the tempting answer because he also works with plants, but his research is on growing and saving indigenous Ethiopian trees.

Bilharzia is spread by a worm that must pass part of its life inside a freshwater snail, so killing the snail breaks the chain of infection. Dr Aklilu Lemma noticed that water downstream of places where people washed clothes with endod berries, the soap berry, had dead snails in it, and he developed endod as a snail killer. Dr Melaku Worede is the tempting choice, but his contribution was the national gene bank and the saving of farmers' seed varieties.

The two skulls found at Herto in the Middle Awash are about 160,000 years old and are among the earliest known remains of our own species. Dr Berhane Asfaw was a co-leader of the team that found and described them. Dr Zeresenay Alemseged is the tempting answer, but his famous find is Selam, the child from Dikika, who belongs to Australopithecus afarensis and is more than 3 million years old.

EHNRI is the Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute, so everything it works on is health or nutrition: vaccine trials, communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, and the nutritional state of mothers and their babies. Forestry is a plant and land science and belongs to the agriculture and biodiversity institutes. Tuberculosis is the tempting answer because it sits next to two nutrition items, but disease research is the core work of a health institute.