Question

When she was 15, Shree Bose traveled from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to visit her grandfather in India. He was dying of cancer. Shree had been close to her grandfather even though she lived far away. “While I think the barrier of living on the other side of the world definitely posed a challenge to being able to talk as often as we would have liked, my grandfather was close to both my brother and me," Shree says. “He would visit when we were younger, and when we got a bit older and would travel to India, he would sit and talk with us for hours.” In Kolkata, a city in eastern India, Shree sat with her grandfather, and, seeing his discomfort, realized her purpose in life: she wanted to fight vicious diseases like cancer. She wanted to play a role in relieving people’s pain. “When my grandfather passed away,” Shree says, “it was the first time where I said, ‘This is what I want to do with my life. This is what I want to make an impact in.’” Shree had always been creative. She enjoyed building things that solved problems or addressed issues she saw in her daily life. For example, in fifth grade she made a remote controlled garbage can that she thought might be helpful to disabled students struggling to take the garbage out to the curb. Now, she wanted to take on cancer. It was time to take things to the next level. Shree returned to the United States and started reading everything she could get her hands on about cancer. She looked at everything from cancer survivors’ blog posts to research journals published by scientists. She watched hours of YouTube videos. “I found myself really loving being able to imagine what was going on within cells,” she recalls. Shree had never studied cancer before. She emailed dozens of professors around Fort Worth to ask about studying in one of their labs. She just wanted a chance to experiment and learn. They all told her she was too young. “I got rejected by a lot of professors before I found one person who was willing to take me on,” she says. That person was Dr. Alakananda Basu, a professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Although she was young and inexperienced, Shree won over Dr. Basu with her energy and passion for learning. “What I find most exciting is your enthusiasm,” Shree says Dr. Basu told her. “And if you keep that while working in my lab, I’ll take you.” Under Dr. Basu’s supervision Shree started research on counteracting resistance to the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, which is given to women with ovarian cancer. She also discovered a unique platform to share her research in 2011, the first year of the Google Science Fair. “They actually had a little banner ad [on the Google homepage],” she recalls. “And I remember I didn’t think too much about it until my Dad mentioned it to me again.” The Google Science Fair is entirely online. Participants demonstrate their projects on websites they make themselves. Shree had never made a website, but she went for it and entered one. So did a lot of other students. In fact, 10,000 students from 91 countries Which of the following best explains why Shree Bose attempted to turn spinach blue?


A. She had to do it for a first-grade science project.

B. She wanted to make eating spinach more fun for her grandfather, whose favorite color was blue.

C. She has always hated the color green.

D. She was curious about whether her reaction to eating spinach would change if the color was different.

Answer 1

D. She wanted to see whether her reaction to eating spinach would change if its color were different.