Plagiarism Risk Quiz: Science Passage 1

Below is a passage from a scholarly publication and a student's attempt to paraphrase the passage. Please indicate by clicking on the appropriate button whether or not you think the paraphrase has plagiarized the original passage.  The result will help you determine whether you risk committing plagiarism while trying to paraphrase a source.

The passage below is taken from Baker, Andrew C. (2001).  Reef corals bleach to survive change. Nature 411, 765 - 766.

The bleaching of coral reefs, in which symbiotic algae are lost from reef-building invertebrates, is usually considered to be a drastic and damaging response to adverse environmental conditions. Here I report results from transplant experiments involving different combinations of coral host and algal symbiont that support an alternative view, in which bleaching offers a high-risk ecological opportunity for reef corals to rid themselves rapidly of suboptimal algae and to acquire new partners. This strategy could be an advantage to coral reefs that face increasingly frequent and severe episodes of mass bleaching as a result of projected climate change. (Baker 765)

Paraphrase: As Andrew C. Baker points out, although coral reef bleaching is usually considered to be a drastic response to adverse environmental conditions and the direct cause of coral mortality, bleaching may in fact be an opportunity (albeit a risky one) for coral reefs to rid themselves of one kind of algae-partner in order to acquire a new partner.  In other words, bleaching itself is not what kills off coral reefs but their inability to acquire life-sustaining partners in their native zones during and after bleaching (2001).

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