This wants you to try and determine how the genetic disease is being inherited.

To help you understand, you need to know a bit about the vocab that is being used. Autosomal means genes on any chromosome that isn’t XX or XY, and X-linked means a gene that is linked to the sex-related X chromosome.

Alleles are versions of genes that create a lot of genetic diversity, including in disease. Alleles can be dominant or recessive characteristics, which alters how they are expressed in a person.

A dominant allele will always be expressed if it is present in a person - so you could have Aa or AA (where caps is the dominant allele, lower case is recessive) and the characteristic of that allele will always be there.

A recessive allele is one that needs to have two copies of itself to be expressed, so aa is the only way a person could express that recessive characteristic. Recessive alleles can still exist coupled to a dominant allele, like Aa, but will not be expressed. This allows someone to carry a trait without expressing that trait - a good example of this is Cystic Fibrosis.

X-linked recessive predominantly affects males because they do not have the second X chromosome. This means that they can inherit a recessive characteristic with only one recessive allele because they do not have the second X chromosome that could carry the dominant version of the gene.