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What is a genotype and phenotype middle school level?

Imagine you're baking a cake. The recipe is like your genotype, it holds all the instructions for what the cake will be like. It tells you what ingredients to use (genes) and how to mix them.

The actual cake you bake is your phenotype. It's the physical expression of the recipe. It's what you see – the color, the taste, the size, etc. The phenotype is what the genotype produces.

So:

* Genotype: The genetic makeup of an organism. It's the complete set of genes an organism inherits from its parents. You can't see it directly, it's like the hidden instructions.

* Phenotype: The observable characteristics of an organism. This includes things like eye color, height, hair color, even things like disease susceptibility. This is what you *can* see and measure.

For example: You might have a genotype that codes for brown eyes (let's say "BB"), and your phenotype would be brown eyes. Someone else might have a genotype that codes for blue eyes ("bb"), and their phenotype would be blue eyes. Things get a little more complicated with combinations of genes, but this is the basic idea.

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