Please note: the real answers here are based on anatomy and physiology as known to science, printed in A&P textbooks as proven by science/medicine. Ideologies may disagree with facts, and if you do, just move on. Facts and opinions can't argue with each other; they are fundamentally different things.
Quiz 1:
1. High blood pressure causes irreparable kidney damage; it shreds the gentle structures in the glomeruli of the nephron. Once your kidneys are wrecked, you die. Get your blood pressure checked. Get it under control. I have ideas....
2. Nope. Bone STORES calcium. It is used by your nerves, to transmit impulses, and by your muscles, as the final GO signal for muscle cells to contract when ordered to by a nerve. This is why if you drink sodas, don't exercise, don't get enough calcium, magnesium and vitamin D, your bones will weaken. The nervous and muscle systems are life-or-death (think about your heart and diaphragm), so bones will give up calcium to preserve them.
3. Metabolism and other chemical reactions only occur in a narrow pH range. Bones, see previous answer. Kidneys release hormones and respond to hormones to release more water or release more ions, to change the pH of the blood. Your lungs will pump deeper and faster to get rid of more CO2 if there is too much acid in the blood. Carbon dioxide is the major contributor to blood acidity under normal conditions; it dissolves in the blood as an acid (not really carried by hemoglobin like they told you in 4th grade).
4. The brain neurons that control thirst are right next to the ones that control hunger. The incoming sensory neurons can terminate in the wrong place very easily. That is why you should always have a nice glass of liquid when you first feel hungry - in case it's really thirst.
Quiz 2
1. Your sympathetic nervous system needs to send a signal to your adrenals and release the adrenal cascade on a millisecond basis to save you from death and danger. Your parasympathetic nervous system has a much harder job: "mopping up" all those stress chemicals through biochemical means takes hours. That's why you can flare up in an instant but take much longer to completely calm down.
2. Vitamin K is an essential element of the blood clotting cascade. A serious intestinal disease, by disrupting Vitamin K production by specific bacteria, can make you more susceptible to uncontrolled bleeding from cuts, internal hemorrhage, etc.
3. Cortisol signals your fat cells to hold on to fat. We evolved in a world where "stress" equaled starvation, not a corporate power grab or nasty in-laws coming to visit.
4. They are talking about System 1 (see Kahneman) or (almost the same) the limbic system, which pre-processes all sensory incoming data, and then decides whether it thinks it can handle it solo or whether it needs advice from the pre-frontal cortex and other System 2 structures. No, you don't have separate brains. We have the same structures as other primates, other mammals, even as far back as reptiles in some cases, but all of these have evolved in their connections and are unique to humans in that sense. The whole reptile/human dichotomy is of limited utility. Read Thinking: Fast and Slow, and learn to talk about System 1 and System 2. Or buy my CD.
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