This puzzle pushes students to read hyperbolic plots. This allows the attention of the lesson to be on varying slope changes (Compared to no slope changes in a linear plot.) The tighter the molecule bonds the oxygen, the slope of the curve will not change as much as per small pressure change. For curve (a) the slope does not begin to drastically change until the oxygen pressure is very low. For most of the oxygen values on the abscissa, the slope changes for curve (b) are more dramatic. Both of these facts extracted from the plot data plus the knowledge that a myoglobin molecule’s bond with oxygen is a stronger bond than the hemoglobin molecule’s bond with oxygen leads to the conclusion that Curve (a) is the myoglobin plot.
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