New York State Regents Examination Living Environment

1.A green cell from a sugar maple leaf in the Catskills is compared with a muscle cell from a cottontail rabbit in the same woods. Which statement describes these cells?

2.Duckweed floating on a quiet cove of Oneida Lake makes sugar while the Sun is out. Where do the oxygen gas it releases and the carbon in that sugar come from?

3.A human skin cell from a student in Buffalo is compared with a human gamete. How many chromosomes does each cell have?

4.A cyclist on the Erie Canal trail is powering her legs by aerobic respiration. Where is most of the usable energy from that respiration released?

5.After a summer of paddling, a guide on the Raquette River has larger shoulder muscles. She claims her children will be born with those larger muscles. Which statement answers her claim?

6.In a beaver pond near Tupper Lake, one bacterium divides and becomes two cells. What kind of reproduction is that?

7.A smooth stone from the Ausable River has a mass of 36 grams and a volume of 12 cubic centimeters. What is the density of the stone?

8.A student in Albany learns that Earth is closest to the Sun in January, yet January in New York is cold. Why is that month still winter?

9.A cheek cell from a student and a cell from a sycamore in Prospect Park both have a thin outer boundary. What is the job of that boundary?

10.A cell inside a white pine needle near Lake George contains the instructions for that cell's proteins. Where are those DNA instructions kept?

11.A liver cell in a white-tailed deer is building a protein from amino acids. Which structure assembles that protein?

12.Two proteins sit side by side in the membrane of a liver cell. One binds a certain hormone, and the other does not. Why does only one protein bind it?

13.A sunflower at a farm stand near the Mohawk River is firm in the morning and wilted by late afternoon. What has changed in its leaf cells?

14.A bacterium in Irondequoit Bay and a cell from a water lily in the same bay are both alive. Which difference is true?

15.A runner in Central Park has cardiac muscle cells, cardiac muscle tissue, a heart, and a circulatory system. Which list is in order from smallest to largest?

16.A drop of food coloring is added to still water taken from Lake George. Without stirring, the color slowly spreads until the water looks even. What process is this?

17.A slice of apple from a Hudson Valley orchard is placed in very salty water. After an hour the slice is softer and smaller. Why did it change?

18.Root cells of an onion in the Black Dirt region take in mineral ions that are already scarcer in the soil water than inside the cells. What must the cells use?

19.A sugar maple on a sunny slope in the Catskills is making food in its leaves. Which statement describes that process?

20.Tiny pores are open on the underside of a London plane leaf in a Manhattan park. Which exchange can happen through those open pores?

21.A fern in a damp gorge at Watkins Glen looks green in daylight. What is the green substance doing in its cells?

22.On a moist morning, the guard cells of a bean leaf in an Ithaca garden are full of water and bowed apart. What does that do for the leaf?

23.After sunset, a sugar maple near Slide Mountain stops making sugar, but its living cells continue to function all night. What are those cells doing?

24.Near the end of a sprint on a track in Syracuse, a runner's muscle cells are not getting oxygen fast enough. Which change happens in those cells?

25.A bakery in Brooklyn mixes yeast into bread dough and leaves the dough in a warm room. The dough expands. What causes the rise?

26.A muscle cell along a rower's arm needs a molecule it can use directly to power contraction. Which molecule supplies that usable energy?

27.In the marshes at Montezuma, cattails grow in shallow water and muskrats eat plant material. Which statement sorts these organisms correctly?

28.A hiker scrapes a knuckle on the trail at Bear Mountain. Over the next days, new skin cells close the scrape. Which process makes those new body cells?

29.Inside an apple blossom in an Ulster County orchard, cells divide to form pollen. How does this division differ from the division that makes ordinary petal cells?

30.During meiosis in those apple-blossom cells, matching chromosomes pair and exchange pieces. What does that exchange do?

31.Cells in a tissue normally divide only when new cells are needed. Sometimes cells ignore those limits, keep dividing, and form a mass. What is that loss of control called?

32.A gene in a brook trout from the Beaver Kill has the DNA base adenine at one position. Which base pairs with adenine in that DNA?

33.A cell in a great blue heron is copying a gene's message so a ribosome can read it. How is that RNA message different from the DNA it was copied from?

34.At a ribosome in a heron cell, the messenger RNA is read in groups while a protein is made. What does one of those groups specify?

35.A change in DNA occurs in one skin cell of a lifeguard at Jones Beach. A different change in DNA occurs in a gamete of another person. Which change can be passed to a child?

36.A biologist says a certain gene in a pumpkin plant helps determine fruit color. What is that gene's direct role?

37.In a school garden in Albany, allele R makes zinnias red and allele r makes them white. Red is dominant. Two heterozygous plants, both Rr, are crossed. What fraction of the offspring is expected to be white?

38.Near Keuka Lake, a grower has two orange pumpkin plants. One has alleles OO and the other has Oo. Orange is dominant to green. Which statement is correct?

39.In a flower bed in Rochester, a red snapdragon crossed with a white snapdragon produces pink offspring. Neither color allele completely hides the other. What pattern is this?

40.A person has blood-type alleles IA and IB. Both A markers and B markers are present on the red blood cells, so the blood type is AB. What pattern of inheritance is this?

41.In a family in Queens, a recessive allele affecting color vision is on the X chromosome. Why do more males than females show the trait?

42.A family chart uses squares for one sex, circles for the other, and shading for people who show a trait. What does a shaded square represent?

43.A human chromosome display from a clinic in Rochester shows three copies of chromosome 21 and 47 chromosomes in all. What is this pattern associated with?

44.A human egg carries an X chromosome, and the sperm that joins it carries a Y chromosome. What is the typical sex-chromosome pattern of the zygote?

45.A microscope in a classroom in Poughkeepsie is focused on a leaf cell. The eyepiece is marked 10× and the objective in use is marked 40×. What is the total magnification?

46.For many years, a grower in Ulster County has planted seeds only from apple trees whose fruit stays crisp in storage. What practice is that?

47.In a woodlot near Syracuse, the most common inherited coat color in a mouse population shifts across many generations. What is that shift?

48.Some brook trout in an Adirondack lake already inherited a greater ability to live in acidic water. After years of low pH, those trout make up more of the population. Why?

49.Two groups of chorus frogs live on opposite rims of a deep gorge and have not interbred for a very long time. Tests show they no longer produce fertile offspring together. What does that support?

50.In an undisturbed road cut near Seneca Lake, a shell fossil lies in a rock layer below a different fossil. Which statement about their ages is supported?

51.In a museum hall in Manhattan, students compare the limb bones of a person, a bat, and a whale. The bones match in pattern but are used for different jobs. What does that match suggest?

52.A muscle cell and a nerve cell in the same person do different jobs, yet both came from one zygote. How can their jobs differ?

53.DNA sequences are compared for a coyote, a gray wolf, and a snapping turtle from a Hudson River marsh. The coyote and wolf sequences are much more alike than either is to the turtle. What does that suggest?

54.Passenger pigeons once flew over New York forests in huge flocks. No living member of that species remains. Which term describes the species now?

55.A biology class in Yonkers discusses a population of bacteria. A few individuals already have an inherited difference that lets them survive an antibiotic, and those individuals reproduce. What increases their share of the population?

56.A student in Newburgh has a cold caused by a virus and asks why an antibiotic will not stop that virus. Which answer is accurate?

57.A clinic in Syracuse keeps a vaccine between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. Why is that storage range used?

58.Months after a vaccination in Albany, a person meets the same kind of microbe. The immune response is faster than the first response. What makes the faster response possible?

59.During an infection, certain white blood cells of a student in White Plains release proteins that lock onto one kind of foreign molecule. What are those proteins?

60.A drop of blood from a healthy student contains several kinds of cells and cell fragments. Which part carries oxygen to the body tissues?

61.On a cold morning in the Catskills, a hiker's internal temperature stays near 37 degrees Celsius even though the air is far colder. What is that steady internal condition called?

62.On a hot afternoon in the Bronx, a player's body temperature starts to rise. Sweating then cools the skin and the temperature falls back. What kind of feedback is sweating in this case?

63.After a student in Schenectady eats a meal, glucose in the blood rises. The pancreas then releases insulin. What does insulin do?

64.During childbirth, contractions cause the release of a hormone that causes still stronger contractions until the baby is born. What kind of feedback is this?

65.A nerve signal reaches the end of one neuron in a student's hand and must cross a tiny gap to the next cell. How does that signal usually cross?

66.A hiker near Lake Placid sees a bear. Adrenaline from the adrenal glands raises the hiker's heart rate. How does this message reach the heart?

67.A jogger along the Bronx River pulls air into the lungs. In which structures does oxygen enter the blood and carbon dioxide leave it?

68.Oxygen picked up in the lungs of a swimmer at Coney Island must be carried to leg muscles. What carries most of that oxygen?

69.A nurse taking a pulse at a wrist in a clinic in Utica is feeling a vessel that leaves the heart. Which statement about human blood vessels is true?

70.After a meal in a diner in Buffalo, digested nutrients enter the blood in large amounts. Where does most of that absorption happen, and what increases the surface there?

71.Saliva mixes with a piece of bread eaten by a student in Troy. An enzyme in the saliva acts on the starch. What does that enzyme do?

72.Urea is made in the liver of a hiker and travels in the blood. Which organs remove urea from the blood and send it toward the bladder?

73.A meal of fried fish is being digested by a person in Oswego. Bile enters the small intestine. What does bile do?

74.A swimmer in Lake George takes a breath before going under. What does the diaphragm do during that inhalation?

75.A human sperm cell and a human egg cell join in an oviduct. How many chromosomes does the zygote have, and why?

76.An embryo developing in the uterus needs nutrients and oxygen and must get rid of wastes. What is the placenta's role?

77.A strawberry plant on a Long Island farm sends out a runner that takes root and forms a new plant. How does the new plant compare genetically with the parent?

78.In a Catskill food chain, beech leaves store 10,000 units of energy, caterpillars eat the leaves, and warblers eat the caterpillars. About how much energy is stored at the next two levels if about 10 percent is transferred each time?

79.A dead hemlock log on the forest floor near Old Forge is crumbling under fungi. What do these decomposers return to the ecosystem, and what do they not recycle?

80.Algae near the sunny surface of Lake George make food, and lake trout eat other animals. Which statement is correct?

81.In a Montezuma marsh, the feeding links are written algae → mayfly → sunfish → heron. What do the arrows show?

82.White-tailed deer in a Westchester woodlot increase for several years, then their numbers level off. Winter food and disease keep the herd from rising without limit. What has the herd approached?

83.Tug Hill gets deep lake-effect snow. In a severe winter, white-tailed deer cannot reach the woody browse they eat. What is winter food access in this case?

84.In a park in Rochester, gray squirrels and eastern chipmunks gather acorns from the same limited oaks. What interaction is this between them?

85.In a bay of Oneida Lake, largemouth bass eat sunfish. One summer the bass become more numerous. What is the likely near-term effect on the sunfish, and what is this relationship?

86.Honeybees visit apple blossoms in a Columbia County orchard, drink nectar, and leave pollen on the next flowers. What kind of relationship is this?

87.A deer tick on a white-tailed deer in the Hudson Valley feeds on the deer's blood for days. The deer is harmed but is not killed at once. What relationship is this?

88.At a sugar house in the Catskills, sap from sugar maples is boiled down. The sap's main sugar is sucrose. To which class of molecule does sucrose belong?

89.Clover in a pasture along the Mohawk River has bacteria living in its roots. The bacteria change nitrogen gas from the air into compounds the clover can use. What is that change called?

90.A hiker exhales carbon dioxide on a trail in the Adirondacks, and a nearby white pine takes carbon dioxide in while the Sun is shining. What cycle do these two events illustrate?

91.On a warm day, a stand of oaks in Harriman State Park loses water vapor from its leaves. What is that loss called, and how does the vapor get out?

92.A hay field near Cayuga Lake is abandoned. The soil remains. Over the years, grasses give way to shrubs and then to young trees. What kind of change is this?

93.Students test Skaneateles Lake and list water temperature, pH, lake trout, algae, dissolved oxygen, and sunlight. Which pair has one abiotic factor and one biotic factor?

94.A pileated woodpecker lives in a mature forest near Ithaca, digs insects out of dead wood, and cuts nest holes that other animals later use. Which statement uses niche and habitat correctly?

95.Zebra mussels, which arrived in New York waterways from elsewhere, cover native mussels in parts of the Hudson and filter out large amounts of plankton. Why are they a problem for the native mussels?

96.Spotted lanternflies have spread through Hudson Valley vineyards, feeding on grapevines and on many other plants. Why can an invasive population like this rise quickly?

97.A salt marsh at Jamaica Bay has many kinds of plants, fish, and birds. Why is that variety valuable if one plant species declines?

98.Beavers in an Adirondack valley cut trees and hold back a stream. The pond that forms is used by herons, frogs, and wetland plants. Why are beavers called a keystone species here?

99.Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from burning fuels can form acids that fall on the Adirondacks. What can that rain do to a lake?

100.A persistent pollutant is present in small Hudson River fish. A heron eats many of those fish over the summer. What is likely to be true of the pollutant?

101.Fertilizer from a field washes into a Finger Lake during a heavy rain. Algae grow rapidly, then die and are broken down. What problem can follow for the fish?

102.Trees and shrubs line a stretch of the Ausable River where brook trout spawn in clean gravel. A landowner clears that bank. What is the likely change in the stream?

103.A teacher in Plattsburgh contrasts two atmospheric problems that both affect living things. Which contrast is accurate?

104.A steep Catskill slope above the Ashokan Reservoir is cleared of trees. A hard rain follows. Why does more soil reach the reservoir than when the forest was standing?

105.An enzyme from a brook trout works in the cold water of an Adirondack stream. The same enzyme is then heated far above the fish's normal temperature and stops working. Why?

106.Pepsin is a protein-digesting enzyme in the human stomach, where the pH is very low. A student mixes pepsin with protein at a neutral pH. What is the likely result?

107.Students in the Bronx test whether compost helps tomato seedlings. Both trays get the same light, water, soil type, and number of plants. One tray also gets compost. Which tray is the control?

108.A student in Queens grows basil under a lamp and changes only how far the lamp sits from the plants. After two weeks the student measures the height of the plants. Which variables are these?