New York State Regents Examination Physical Setting/Earth Science

1.A cut block of Lockport dolostone from a quarry on the Niagara Escarpment has a mass of 48 grams and a volume of 16 cubic centimeters. What is its density?

2.During a January ice-fishing derby on Chateaugay Lake, Earth is at its closest point to the Sun. The noon Sun is low, daylight is short, and the lake is locked in winter. Why is it winter there?

3.At a harbor festival in Greenport, the Moon is a thin crescent. A poster says the dark part is Earth's shadow. The last lunar eclipse seen from that harbor was more than a year earlier. Which statement is right?

4.At solar noon on a clear day, the steeple of a church in Cazenovia casts a shadow across the level green. Which way does the shadow point?

5.A scoreboard in Elmira casts a longer shadow at 8:30 a.m. than it casts at solar noon on the same clear day. Why is the morning shadow longer?

6.In a classroom tank in Olean, a quartz pebble dropped into water goes to the bottom, while an ice cube from the same water stays at the surface. Why?

7.A railroad cut near Hornell shows flat beds of shale and sandstone that have not been overturned. A gray shale is at the bottom and a red sandstone is at the top. Which bed is oldest?

8.At a county fair in Norwich, a child says the bright Sun cannot be a star because stars appear only at night. Which correction is accurate?

9.From a dock at Sylvan Beach on Oneida Lake, Polaris stands 43 degrees above the northern horizon. About what is the dock's latitude?

10.Two weather balloons rise on the same meridian over New York, one at 44.0 degrees north and the other at 41.0 degrees north. Using 111 kilometers for each degree of latitude, how far apart are they north to south?

11.Buoy R reports 41.0 degrees north, 73.5 degrees west. Buoy S reports 41.0 degrees north, 71.8 degrees west. Which buoy is farther east?

12.Solar noon is happening at 75 degrees west. Earth turns through 15 degrees of longitude each hour. How much later is solar noon at 105 degrees west?

13.A trail on the slope of Slide Mountain drops from 1,200 meters to 960 meters over 8 kilometers. What is the average gradient?

14.A crew measures a straight reach of the Black River near Lyons Falls. It is 4 meters wide, averages 2 meters deep, and flows at 1.5 meters per second. Discharge equals width times depth times speed. What is the discharge?

15.Porosity is the percent of a sample that is open pore space. A bucket of sand from a pit near Riverhead has a total volume of 200 cubic centimeters, including 60 cubic centimeters of pore space. What is the porosity?

16.One jar holds only medium sand grains of a single size. Another jar holds pebbles with clay packed into the gaps. Which jar has the higher porosity, and why?

17.Water soaks quickly through the sand bar at Sandy Pond and barely moves through clay in a drumlin near Lyons. Which comparison is right?

18.One tube is packed with coarse gravel and another with fine silt. Both stand in a pan of water. Where does the water climb higher, and why?

19.Utica's station model shows 58 upper left, 46 lower left, and pressure code 186. The wind staff comes from the west with one full barb and one half barb. Upper left is Fahrenheit temperature, lower left is Fahrenheit dewpoint, a code below 500 takes a leading 10 and a decimal before the last digit, a full barb is 10 knots, and a half barb is 5 knots. Which reading matches?

20.On a surface map, isobars are packed tightly over the Southern Tier and spread far apart along the St. Lawrence. Where is the surface wind likely stronger?

21.A high-pressure center sits over Cooperstown on a Northern Hemisphere map. Which surface pattern fits that high?

22.Before a cold front reaches Jamestown, the air is 23 degrees Celsius with a south wind. Which change best fits the hours after that front passes?

23.In April, cool damp air reaches Orient Point after traveling over the cold North Atlantic. Which air-mass name fits?

24.At dawn at Fair Haven on Lake Ontario, the air temperature is 6 degrees Celsius and the dewpoint is also 6 degrees Celsius. What does that match?

25.On a hot afternoon in Dunkirk, the town is much warmer than Lake Erie, and a breeze blows from the lake onto the shore. Why?

26.A storm center is over Pittsburgh at noon. New York lies in the prevailing westerlies. Which city is most likely to feel that storm later the same day?

27.On a bend of the Allegheny River at Salamanca, the current is fastest along the outside bank and slowest along the inside bank. What is happening to those banks?

28.In a straight, symmetric reach of the Moose River near McKeever, friction is greatest against the bed and the banks. Where is the water moving fastest?

29.A creek enters the quiet southern end of Keuka Lake at Hammondsport and slows. It has been carrying sand and silt. What is likely to grow at the mouth?

30.A broad bend of the Tioughnioga River near Cortland has a narrow neck. During a flood the river cuts straight across that neck. What can be left in the abandoned curve?

31.On a ridge in Allegany County, rain on the north slope runs to the Genesee and then to Lake Ontario. Rain on the south slope runs to the Allegheny and then toward the Gulf of Mexico. What is the ridge?

32.A creek leaves a steep ravine in Allegany State Park and slows on the valley floor. It has been carrying clay, sand, and pebbles. Which particles drop first?

33.A pit near Avon exposes a jumbled mix of clay, sand, and scratched boulders. The material is not in layers. Which deposit is this?

34.The Harbor Hill ridge of till on northern Long Island lies north of an older ridge of till farther south. The ice built Harbor Hill when it paused after it had already reached that southern ridge. What is Harbor Hill?

35.Near Palmyra, south of Lake Ontario, many smooth hills of till are stretched north-south. Moving ice shaped them. What are the hills?

36.At Mendon Ponds, a round pond fills a bowl in glacial sand and gravel. No stream carved the bowl. A buried block of ice melted and the ground sank. What is the pond?

37.Avalanche Pass in the High Peaks has a broad U-shaped cross section, and a side stream drops in from a higher notch. Which agent most likely deepened the main valley?

38.Bedrock near Watertown carries parallel scratches that trend north-south. The scratches match stones that were frozen in moving ice. What do they show?

39.After the thick ice sheet left the St. Lawrence Valley, the crust that had been under the ice began to rise, and old glacial-lake shorelines were warped. What is that rise called?

40.Water freezes in a crack in the limestone cliff at Thacher Park. The crack widens, and a flake of the same rock later falls. What widened the crack?

41.In a quarry in the Onondaga limestone near Jamesville, groundwater has widened cracks into small rooms, and chips of the rock fizz in dilute acid. Which explanation fits the rooms?

42.A sandstone cobble on the Lake Ontario shore at Somerset is broken into many chips. The chips together have the same volume and the same rock. Why will the chips weather faster outdoors?

43.At the Helderberg escarpment, resistant limestone sits above weaker shale. The shale has worn back, and limestone blocks overhang the slope. What is this pattern?

44.A display in Utica holds coal, window glass, granite, and a quartz crystal. A mineral is a natural inorganic solid with a definite composition and an orderly atomic pattern. Which one can be a mineral?

45.Clear, hard crystals from the Mohawk Valley are nicknamed Herkimer diamonds. They scratch glass and are silicon dioxide. What are they?

46.A dark mineral from an ore pile near Mineville looks metallic on a fresh face, but the powder scraped from it is reddish brown. What is that powder color called?

47.A glittery flake from Fordham gneiss in the Bronx peels into thinner sheets along one flat direction. What is that breakage?

48.A sample from a pluton in the Hudson Highlands has large interlocking crystals of quartz, feldspar, and mica. The crystals grew while magma cooled slowly underground. What type of rock is it?

49.A student in Warsaw reads a label on a dark igneous sample. The label says the lava cooled quickly at the surface and the crystals are too small to see without a lens. Which description matches the label?

50.In a Gloversville classroom, a pale volcanic rock full of gas holes floats in a beaker of water. Why can this piece float?

51.A rock from the ridge west of New Paltz contains rounded quartz pebbles held by cement. The pebbles are smooth rather than jagged. What does that roundness suggest?

52.The Bertie dolostone near Herkimer contains eurypterid fossils. Eurypterids lived in salty water. The rock is now on dry land. What does that fossil record?

53.Along the northwest edge of the Adirondacks, some Potsdam sandstone was recrystallized into quartzite. The rock did not melt. What was the parent rock?

54.A fine-grained sample in an Oneonta lab splits into thin flat sheets. Its label says it was shale that was squeezed during mountain building and did not melt. What is the sample now?

55.Near Elizabethtown, limestone a few meters from a dike was recrystallized by the magma's heat and did not melt. The same limestone 100 meters away was unchanged. What happened beside the dike?

56.A sample set shows this history: granite weathers into sand, the sand is cemented into sandstone, and heat and pressure turn the sandstone into quartzite without melting. Which sequence is that?

57.A road cut near Wellsville shows a fault that breaks a shale layer and slides one side downward. The shale does not cut through the fault. Which is younger?

58.Limestone near Mount Morris contains angular pieces of sandstone. The limestone formed around those pieces. Which material is older?

59.A well in Nassau County passes through sand, then a buried zone of old soil and weathered pebbles, then much older clay. The soil was at the surface before the sand was laid on it. What is that buried surface?

60.The same brachiopod species appears in a limestone near Olean and in a limestone near Cobleskill. The species lived a short time and was spread widely through an ancient sea. Why is it useful?

61.A log buried in mud beside Oneida Lake has 25 percent of the carbon-14 it started with. The half-life given for this problem is 5,700 years. How old is the log?

62.In late autumn, surface water in Lake George cools. Water near 4 degrees Celsius sinks and the lake mixes. Later, still colder liquid water stays on top. Why does the 4-degree water sink?

63.A black shale near Canajoharie holds graptolite fossils. Graptolites drifted in ancient seas. What does that shale record?

64.GPS units in Buffalo, Albany, and Montauk drift the same way at a few centimeters a year, and the distances between them barely change. What does that shared motion show?

65.A class in Olean colors a map of ocean-crust ages. The youngest basalt is at a mid-ocean ridge, where magma rises as plates move apart. How does age change away from the ridge?

66.An oceanic plate sinks beneath a continental plate. A trench forms, and volcanoes rise on the continent. Which boundary is this?

67.A class in Wellsville compares boundaries. At one of them, two plates slide past each other horizontally. Crust is neither created nor destroyed there. What type of boundary is it?

68.The Hawaiian islands get older toward the northwest, and active volcanoes are at the southeast end. The Pacific plate is moving northwest over a deep magma source. What is that source?

69.Some P waves that pass through Earth's center slow in the outer core and then speed up again in the innermost region. What does that inner speedup support?

70.Two quakes have the same magnitude. One focus is 5 kilometers down near Newcomb, and the other is 60 kilometers down. Why can the shallow quake shake nearby towns more?

71.One seismograph station finds that a quake was 400 kilometers away but cannot tell the direction. Why do geologists use at least three stations to locate the epicenter?

72.Which seismic wave arrives first at a distant station, and how does that wave move the rock?

73.One number rates the energy of a single quake felt in the lower Hudson Valley. Shaking is stronger on loose fill along the Yonkers waterfront than on solid gneiss in the Bronx. Which pairing is right?

74.Which list orders Earth's layers from the surface downward and states the outer core correctly?

75.Tectonic plates are pieces of the rigid outer shell that includes the crust and the uppermost mantle. What is that shell called, and what lies under it?

76.Lava at a ridge locks in the direction of Earth's magnetic field as it cools. Stripes of normal and reversed polarity mirror each other on opposite sides of the ridge. What do the stripes support?

77.Near Boonville, a winding ridge of sorted sand and gravel snakes across the land. A stream flowing in a tunnel under the ice left it behind. What is the ridge?

78.A hand sample of gneiss from Bear Mountain has a mass of 65 grams and a volume of 25 cubic centimeters. What is its density?

79.A chip of Onondaga limestone has a density of 2.5 grams per cubic centimeter and a mass of 50 grams. What is its volume?

80.A lab slip lists an accepted density of 2.50 grams per cubic centimeter. A student measures 2.25 grams per cubic centimeter. Using the absolute difference divided by the accepted value, times 100, what is the percent error?

81.A poster in a library in Hudson shows a comet orbit. The two foci are 6 centimeters apart, and the major axis is 30 centimeters long. What is the eccentricity?

82.A model at a museum in Buffalo shows a small body orbiting the Sun at an average distance of 4 astronomical units. Using P squared equals a cubed, with P in years and a in astronomical units, what is its orbital period?

83.Kepler's first law says each planet's path around the Sun is an ellipse. Where is the Sun in that path?

84.A warm front approaches Corning from the south. High thin clouds appear first, then lower gray clouds and many hours of steady rain. What change is likely as the front passes?

85.A marina on the south shore of Long Island is at 40 degrees north. On an equinox, how high is the noon Sun above the southern horizon?

86.Compare solar noon and daylight in Oneonta on June 21 with solar noon and daylight there on December 21. Which statement is right?

87.From a beach at Olcott, where does the Sun set on the June solstice compared with the September equinox?

88.Massena is near 45 degrees north. Can the noon Sun ever stand directly overhead there?

89.Massena is farther north than Montauk. How do their daylight hours compare on June 21?

90.A tall pendulum in a museum stairwell in Corning slowly changes the direction of its swing relative to the floor. What does that demonstrate?

91.Over one night, stars rise in the east and set in the west as seen from a meadow near Andes. What motion explains that path?

92.The Moon takes about 27.3 days to orbit Earth once relative to the stars, but the cycle from new moon to new moon is about 29.5 days. Why is the phase cycle longer?

93.On the night of a full moon in Geneva, the Moon rises as the Sun sets. Why do those two events come together?

94.Craters on the Moon stay sharp for a very long time. A crater of similar age on Earth is often worn away. Why do lunar craters last?

95.A student thinks a spring tide can happen only in April. At Port Jefferson the tidal range is also especially large near full moons in October. What does spring mean in spring tide?

96.During a lunar eclipse, sky watchers in North Hudson see the Moon darken, and so do people far to the east on Earth's night side. A total solar eclipse that year is total only along a narrow strip. Why is the lunar eclipse seen so widely?

97.A total solar eclipse path runs from Lake Ontario into the Adirondacks. Massena is inside the path and sees the Sun's bright face covered. Elmira, far south of the path, does not see totality. Why is totality limited to a narrow path?

98.Over several weeks, Mars appears to slow, move westward against the stars, and then move east again as seen from New Paltz. What causes that retrograde motion?

99.From a boardwalk at Long Beach, Venus is bright in the west after sunset for several weeks and later appears in the east before sunrise. It is never high in the south at midnight. Why?

100.A groin built straight out from a Shinnecock beach has a wide pile of sand on its east side and a scoured, narrow beach on its west side. Which way is sand moving along the shore?

101.From a field near Newcomb, a child says Polaris must be the brightest star in the night sky because it stays nearly still. Which correction is right?

102.A class in Fredonia views a projected image of the Sun. Dark spots appear on the bright disk. The spots are cooler than the surface around them. Why do they look dark?

103.On a topographic map of a ridge in Allegany State Park, the contour interval is 20 meters. A brook crosses a V-shaped bend in the 200-meter contour, and the V points toward the 220-meter contour. Which way does the brook flow?

104.After a January storm in Oswego, fresh snow covers a lawn beside a plowed asphalt lot. On the next clear afternoon, which surface absorbs more incoming sunlight, and why?

105.Near Penn Yan, a south-facing vineyard slope and a north-facing wooded slope receive the same hours of daylight on a clear March day. Which slope gets more intense sunlight, and why?

106.On a windy afternoon, the air is well mixed. Why is the summit of Hunter Mountain usually colder than the village of Tannersville in the valley below?

107.Orient Point, on the east end of Long Island, and Wellsville, inland at nearly the same latitude, have different yearly temperature patterns. Which difference fits the ocean's effect?

108.A west wind crosses the length of Lake Erie. Heavy snow falls on the hills near Springville, east of the lake, while a town at the lake's western end gets much less. Why does Springville get the snow?