An organism's physical appearance, or visible traits, is called:

• A. Phenotype
• B. Genotype
• C. DNA
• D. Gene

Answer: (A)

The main idea here is distinguishing what you can see from what the genetic material actually contains. An organism’s visible traits—its height, eye color, leaf shape, or flower color—are called the phenotype. These are the traits that express as a result of how the organism’s genotype is manifested in its environment.

The genotype is the genetic blueprint—the specific alleles an organism carries. It provides the information that could be expressed as traits, but it isn’t itself what you observe. DNA is the molecule that stores this genetic information, and a gene is a particular segment of DNA that codes for a trait. So the outward, observable traits are the phenotype.