New York State Regents Examination Life Science: Biology

1.A crew working along the Bronx River looks at a cell from a red oak leaf and a cell from a gray squirrel's muscle. Which comparison is accurate?

2.A mayfly nymph clings to a stone in the Beaver Kill. What is the main job of the cell membrane in one of its body cells?

3.A painted turtle basking at the Montezuma wetlands keeps the DNA of its body cells in a membrane-bound compartment. What is that compartment?

4.A common milkweed plant beside a Hudson Valley field is building a protein from amino acids inside a leaf cell. Which structure joins those amino acids?

5.A skunk cabbage leaf in a swamp near Syracuse has a large water-filled sac that helps the cell stay firm. What is that sac?

6.How does a bacterium in the soil of a Brooklyn community garden compare with a cell from a tomato leaf in that garden?

7.Which statement fits cell theory for a white-tailed deer living in Harriman State Park?

8.A skin cell from a freshwater eastern newt in a vernal pool near Albany is placed in very salty water. What happens to the water?

9.Oxygen in a cold Adirondack stream is more concentrated in the water than in the blood arriving at a brook trout's gills. How does oxygen enter the blood?

10.Root cells of a white pine on Tug Hill take in mineral ions that are already more concentrated inside the cells than in the soil water. How do those ions enter?

11.On a hot afternoon in Central Park, a runner's body temperature rises. Sweating increases, and the temperature falls back toward its usual level. What kind of control is that?

12.After a student in Troy eats a bagel, glucose in the blood rises. Which response helps bring that glucose back down?

13.Which list goes from the smallest structure to the largest in a red fox in the Adirondacks?

14.A nerve cell and a muscle cell from the same white-tailed deer in Harriman State Park contain the same genes. Why do the cells do different jobs?

15.How is a mature red blood cell in a cyclist on the Bronx River Greenway suited to carrying oxygen?

16.Onion roots in the Black Dirt region of Orange County are covered with tiny root hairs. How do those hairs help the plant?

17.Amylase in the saliva of a student in Poughkeepsie starts breaking starch in a piece of bread. Which statement describes the enzyme?

18.An enzyme that works in the cold body of a brook trout from the Ausable River stops working after it is boiled. Why?

19.A brook trout holding in a cold pool of the Ausable River gets most of its usable energy from aerobic respiration. Where in its muscle cells is most of that ATP produced?

20.A white oak leaf in Prospect Park both builds sugar and breaks sugar down for energy. Which organelles do those two jobs?

21.On a bright June morning, a sugar maple on a Catskill slope releases oxygen gas and stores sugar. Where do that oxygen gas and the carbon in the sugar come from?

22.What does a sumac leaf along the Palisades use for photosynthesis, and what does that process produce?

23.A pin oak leaf in Flushing Meadows Corona Park looks green in July. What is chlorophyll doing in that leaf?

24.In October, a sugar maple in Lake Placid turns yellow and orange. What makes those colors visible?

25.Tiny pores dot the underside of a birch leaf at Minnewaska. What do those stomata do when they are open?

26.Guard cells surround a stoma on a bean leaf in a Queens community garden. What happens as their water content changes?

27.A tall red oak at Bear Mountain moves water from damp soil to leaves high in the crown. Which tissue carries that water?

28.Apple trees near Marlboro store sugar made in the leaves. How does that sugar reach a growing fruit or a root?

29.On a dry, windy afternoon, a shagbark hickory at Letchworth loses water vapor from its leaves. How does that loss affect water in the trunk?

30.Water rises inside a white pine on the shore of Upper Saranac Lake without the tree having a pump. What does cohesion contribute?

31.A carrot root in an Orange County field takes up dissolved minerals, and blood in a rabbit nearby carries dissolved sugars and salts. Why can water do both jobs?

32.In January, ice covers the surface of Lake George while liquid water, where lake trout can still swim, stays underneath. Why does the ice remain on top?

33.A muscle cell in a harbor seal swimming off Montauk can break down glucose with oxygen or by fermentation. Which comparison is accurate?

34.A hiker sprints up a steep stretch of trail at Bear Mountain, and the leg muscles cannot get enough oxygen for a moment. What can those muscle cells do?

35.A red maple in Van Cortlandt Park makes sugar on a sunny afternoon. What is true of that same tree at midnight?

36.A young cottontail in Prospect Park grows muscle and stores fat. Where does the matter in those new tissues come from?

37.Phytoplankton in Lake Champlain capture sunlight, and a small fish eats those phytoplankton. Which roles are these organisms playing?

38.Shelf fungi grow on a dead yellow birch in the Five Ponds Wilderness. What is their role?

39.At a peat bog in the Adirondacks, a team lists the bog turtles of one species, the other living things, and the water, peat, and light. Which description fits?

40.In a model of the Hudson estuary, phytoplankton store 10,000 energy units. River herring eat the phytoplankton, and a striped bass eats the herring. About how much of that energy is stored in the bass?

41.A fallen hemlock log near Cranberry Lake is decaying. What happens to carbon in that log?

42.Clover in a Champlain Valley pasture has nodules on its roots. How does that clover obtain usable nitrogen?

43.A winter range in the Catskills can support only so many white-tailed deer over time. What is that limit called, and can it change?

44.Piping plovers on a Long Island beach have plenty of food, but only a few open sandy patches are safe for nests. What does nest space do to the population?

45.A headwater stream in the High Peaks is cold, has a low pH, and holds brook trout and mayfly nymphs. Which factors are abiotic?

46.Karner blue caterpillars in the Albany Pine Bush feed on wild blue lupine. What does that feeding relationship say about the butterfly's niche?

47.Honey bees visit apple blossoms in an Ulster County orchard, drink nectar, and carry pollen from flower to flower. What kind of relationship is this?

48.Sea lampreys in Seneca Lake attach to lake trout and feed on their body fluids, weakening the trout. Which relationship is this?

49.Moss grows on the bark of a sugar maple in Washington Park in Albany. The moss has a place to live, and the tree is essentially unharmed. What is that relationship?

50.Beavers along a stream in the Adirondacks build dams. The ponds behind the dams are used by frogs, ducks, and insects. What does that show?

51.Zebra mussels, native to Eurasia, spread in the Hudson River, cover hard surfaces, and take plankton that native mussels and young fish use. Why are they called invasive?

52.PCBs that entered the Hudson River occur in tiny amounts in small organisms, in higher amounts in fish, and in still higher amounts in bald eagles that eat those fish. What is this pattern?

53.A rockslide in the Shawangunks exposes bare rock with no soil. Lichens begin to grow on the rock. What kind of change is starting?

54.A hay field in Columbia County is abandoned. The soil stays in place, and grasses, shrubs, and then trees return. What is this, and why is it faster than colonization of bare rock?

55.The marshes around Cranberry Lake support many kinds of sedges, insects, fish, and birds. Why does that variety matter to the community?

56.Earth is closest to the Sun in January. A student in Syracuse wonders why that month is still winter in New York. Which explanation is accurate?

57.From a pier in Buffalo, a student sees a crescent Moon and says Earth's shadow is darkening the rest of it. What is accurate?

58.A clinic in Rochester compares chromosomes in a patient's skin cell with chromosomes in a sperm cell. Which count is correct?

59.Skin on a hiker's hand is repaired after a scrape on Breakneck Ridge. The dividing skin cells each start with 46 chromosomes. What does mitosis do here?

60.Which statement describes meiosis in people who live along the Genesee River?

61.Double-stranded DNA from an American beech leaf in Allegany State Park is 30 percent adenine. What percent is guanine?

62.A chromosome in a cell of a Canada goose on the Niagara River contains many coded sections. What is one gene on that chromosome?

63.In a simplified model, a gene for feather shade in a herring gull has two versions, B and b. What are B and b?

64.A white-tailed deer near New Paltz has the allele pair Bb for a single-gene model of coat shade. What is that deer called?

65.In a single-gene model, allele T is dominant to t. A tree swallow near Oneida Lake has the genotype Tt and shows the T trait. Which statement is accurate?

66.Two cuttings from one grape vine near Keuka Lake have the same genes. One is planted in deep moist soil and one in thin dry soil, and one vine grows much larger. What does that show?

67.In a single-gene model of spot pattern in eastern newts from a pond near Ithaca, N is dominant for extra orange spots and n is no extra spots. Two heterozygous newts, Nn and Nn, have many offspring. What fraction is expected to have no extra spots?

68.In a simplified flower-color model for phlox in a Hudson Valley garden, RR plants are red, WW plants are white, and RW plants are pink. Two pink RW plants are crossed. Which offspring pattern is expected?

69.A person in Albany has one IA allele and one IB allele for the ABO blood group. Both A and B markers appear on the blood cells. What inheritance pattern is this?

70.A recessive allele that affects color vision is on the X chromosome. Why does the trait show up more often in males in a family from Queens?

71.In a simplified model of coat color in a goat herd in Delaware County, both parents have solid coats and one kid has a recessive spotted coat. What must be true in this model?

72.Ultraviolet light changes one DNA base in a skin cell of a lifeguard on Fire Island. What is that change?

73.Which mutation can be passed from a parent in White Plains to a child?

74.In cells of a hellbender in the Allegheny River, what is the usual path of genetic information when a protein is made?

75.Where is messenger RNA made from a DNA gene in a cell of a red-tailed hawk nesting on a cliff along the Hudson?

76.After mRNA leaves the nucleus of a cell in a dairy cow in Madison County, where is that message used to build a protein?

77.A coding stretch of mRNA in a honeybee from an Ithaca orchard has 18 bases and no stop codon among them. How many amino acids does that stretch code for?

78.A pea plant in a school garden in Oneonta is heterozygous, Tt, for one gene. What do its gametes receive for that gene?

79.In a model, flower color and stem height in a meadow rue along the Moose River are controlled by genes on different chromosomes. What does independent assortment predict?

80.During meiosis in a silver maple along the Mohawk River, homologous chromosomes exchange matching pieces. What is the result?

81.A strawberry bed near Seneca Lake spreads when parent plants send out runners that take root. Ignoring new mutations, how do the new plants compare with the parent?

82.Eastern bluebirds nesting near a vineyard by Keuka Lake raise chicks from fertilized eggs. Why are the chicks not genetically identical to one another?

83.A student who rows on the Hudson River every summer says her future children will be born with larger arm muscles because she trained. Which statement is accurate?

84.One sugar maple in a Delaware County sugarbush is huge but leaves no seedlings. A smaller maple nearby leaves many seedlings that survive. Which tree has higher evolutionary fitness, and why?

85.Periwinkles on a Long Island rock have shells darkened by mud. The mud washes off and is not in their DNA. Can natural selection turn that mud color into a gene in the next generation?

86.In a flock of only 12 common terns on a Long Island bay, a few birds happen not to breed one year for reasons unrelated to their traits. One allele becomes less common by chance. What is this?

87.Pollen from pitch pines in one part of the Albany Pine Bush fertilizes trees in another part of the bush. What is the genetic result?

88.Fish of one species live above a waterfall on a New York stream, and fish of the same species live below it. They cannot reach one another. If this separation continues for a very long time, what can happen?

89.The wing of a little brown bat in an Albany barn and the flipper of a whale off Long Island contain similar arm bones, used for flying in one case and swimming in the other. What are those bones?

90.A dragonfly over the Montezuma marshes and a herring gull over the same water both use wings to fly. The wings are built very differently. What does that comparison show?

91.Fossils of ancient sea scorpions, New York's state fossil, occur in sedimentary rock in the state. In an undisturbed stack of those layers, what do the fossils show?

92.Brook trout and lake trout in the Adirondacks share much more of their DNA sequence with each other than either shares with a horseshoe crab from Long Island. What does that similarity suggest?

93.Whales that pass offshore of New York have small hip bones that are not used for walking. How do biologists interpret those bones?

94.In a model, a storm kills most of a tiny dune-beetle population on Fire Island at random. The few survivors have less genetic variation than the earlier population. What is this?

95.In a model, a few warblers from a large mainland population are blown to an island in the St. Lawrence River and start a new flock. The island flock lacks some alleles that were common on the mainland. What is this?

96.A harbor porpoise in the New York Bight and a striped bass in the same water both have streamlined bodies, but they are not close relatives. What evolutionary pattern is that?

97.Growers in Ulster County keep propagating apple trees whose fruit has the taste and firmness they want, and they do not propagate the others. What is changing the orchard population?

98.In a bacterial population, a few cells already inherited a trait that lets them survive a particular antibiotic. After that antibiotic is used, those cells make up more of the population that remains. What happened?

99.A person in Buffalo, a red oak in Delaware Park, and a soil bacterium there all use nearly the same genetic code to translate codons into amino acids. What does that shared code support?

100.Snowshoe hares in the Adirondacks grow a white coat in winter and a brown coat in summer. The ability to change with the season is inherited. What is the white winter coat as a heritable trait?

101.After a meal in a diner in Utica, insulin leaves the pancreas and affects liver cells. How does that message travel, and what kind of signal is it?

102.A tomato seedling on a windowsill in Queens bends toward the daylight. What causes the bend?

103.Digested nutrients from a meal in Saratoga Springs enter the blood of the person who ate it. Which structure provides the large surface that absorbs most of those nutrients?

104.A runner on the Erie Canal trail breathes faster. Where in the lungs does oxygen enter the blood?

105.In a leg muscle of a hockey player skating in Lake Placid, oxygen moves from the blood into the muscle cells. Across which vessels does that exchange happen?

106.Immune cells in a student from Yonkers make proteins that bind one particular foreign marker and not a different marker. What are those proteins?

107.A nurse in Rochester describes the two sides of a patient's heart. Which description is accurate?

108.River herring in the Hudson travel in a tight school when striped bass are feeding nearby. What survival advantage can that group behavior give?