A student learns that the traits offspring express depend on the genes they receive from their parents during meiosis.

Question

She knows that brown eyes (B) are dominant to blue eyes (b). She views a Punnett square of a cross between a homozygous parent and a heterozygous parent.

Which two questions can the student answer using the Punnett square?

A.

What is the genotype of the female parent?

B.

What are the genotypes of the grandparents?

C.

What is the probability of an offspring being male?

D.

What is the probability of an offspring carrying a recessive allele?

E.

What is the percent likelihood of an offspring having brown eyes?

Answer 1

The two questions that the student can answer using the Punnett square are:

D. What is the probability of an offspring carrying a recessive allele?
E. What is the percent likelihood of an offspring having brown eyes?

Options A and B are not answerable with just the Punnett square because the genotype of the female parent is assumed to be known (homozygous or heterozygous) depending on the setup, and the genotypes of the grandparents are also not given in the Punnett square information.

Option C regarding the probability of an offspring being male is unrelated to the eye color traits represented in the Punnett square. The Punnett square shows the distribution of alleles, not sex chromosomes.