Virginia Standards of Learning End-of-Course Earth Science

1.Which type of rock forms when lava cools and hardens?

2.A Piedmont quarry exposes light-colored rock whose quartz and feldspar crystals are large enough to see. The melt that made it stayed deep underground. What do those large crystals record?

3.Dark rock from an old lava flow has crystals too small to see without magnification. Which cooling history fits that texture?

4.A black volcanic rock looks like glass and shows no crystals at all. Which cooling outcome produced that texture?

5.A pale volcanic rock is full of tiny holes and is light enough to float until the holes fill with water. What created the holes?

6.Sand and mud settle on a James River floodplain and, after deep burial, become solid layered rock. Which pair of processes turns that loose sediment into sedimentary rock?

7.Folded layers in the Valley and Ridge are made mostly of the mineral calcite and contain marine shells, even though the valley is dry land today. How did most of this limestone first form?

8.A Valley and Ridge cliff is made of cemented sand grains and preserves an ancient beach. What rock is it, and which sedimentary class does it belong to?

9.A rock that formed from the finest mud in a quiet bay splits into thin, earthy sheets. Which rock is it?

10.Clouds thicken over Roanoke for many hours, steady rain falls, and the air afterward is warmer than the air that was there before. A warmer air mass has advanced. Which boundary passed?

11.In the Appalachian Plateau of southwest Virginia, miners remove a black rock that formed after thick plant debris in ancient swamps was buried. Which statement names that rock and its origin?

12.Limestone is later heated and squeezed but does not melt. Its calcite recrystallizes into an interlocking mosaic without aligned sheets of mica. What is the new rock?

13.Near Arvonia in the Piedmont, fine-grained rock splits into smooth, thin sheets. It began as shale and was changed by low-grade metamorphism. What is the rock now?

14.Sandstone along the Blue Ridge was recrystallized until the quartz grains locked together. The rock is now very hard and breaks across the grains rather than around them. What is the metamorphic result?

15.High-grade rock in the Blue Ridge shows alternating light and dark mineral bands. It formed while an ancient mountain belt was being built. Which name and history fit?

16.A metamorphic rock has platy minerals lined up in parallel sheets. What caused that foliation?

17.Country rock next to a small magma intrusion is baked only a short distance from the contact. Farther away, the same layer is unchanged. Which kind of metamorphism is this?

18.Wide areas of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge contain foliated metamorphic rocks that formed while the Appalachians were being built. What kind of metamorphism was that?

19.Granite in the Piedmont weathers to sand, the sand becomes sandstone, and that sandstone later changes to quartzite. What does this path illustrate?

20.Frost breaks bedrock on Mount Rogers, and a stream later carries the chips downhill. Which statement separates the two processes?

21.On a high ridge near Mount Rogers, water freezes in cracks overnight and the cracks widen over many winters. Which weathering process is at work?

22.Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide, becomes weakly acidic, and soaks into limestone in the Valley and Ridge. What is the outcome over a long time?

23.Rock faces in the Piedmont show red and yellow stains where iron-bearing minerals have reacted with oxygen and water. Which process produced the stains?

24.After a storm, the James River runs muddy through Richmond. What is the river doing with that sediment?

25.Where the James River enters the quieter water of the Chesapeake Bay, the current slows. What happens to much of the sand and mud the river had been carrying?

26.Waves and currents along Virginia's Eastern Shore pile sand into long, low islands just offshore of the mainland. What coastal outcome is that?

27.A coastal storm sits off Virginia Beach. Winds along the shore blow from the northeast, surf cuts into the dunes, and eastern Virginia gets heavy rain or snow. What is that storm, and what is a main outcome on the beach?

28.Water leaves the Chesapeake Bay as vapor, forms clouds, falls as rain on the Piedmont, and runs back toward the bay in the James River. Which sequence names that path?

29.Quartz is classified as a mineral, while a chunk of granite is classified as a rock. Which set of traits must a substance have to be a mineral?

30.On many summer afternoons Virginia Beach stays a little cooler than Richmond, and on many winter nights the beach stays a little milder. What property of the nearby ocean explains that difference?

31.A forecast says Richmond will have thunderstorms tomorrow afternoon. A climate summary says Richmond's summers are hot and humid year after year. Which distinction fits those two statements?

32.During a month of clear evenings in Charlottesville, the bright part of the Moon grows from a slim edge to a full disk and then shrinks again. What causes that repeating change?

33.Mica from a Piedmont schist splits into paper-thin flat sheets, while a piece of quartz from the same hillside breaks into uneven chips. What are those two breakage patterns called?

34.Richmond is in daylight, then later the same city is in darkness, with about 24 hours from one sunrise to the next. Which motion causes that cycle?

35.In July, air arriving in Richmond from the Gulf of Mexico feels hot and sticky. In January, air arriving from central Canada feels cold and dry. Which names match those two air masses?

36.One night the full Moon over the Eastern Shore darkens for a while and then brightens again. On a different date, the Moon's disk covers the Sun during daytime when the Moon is new. Which pairing names those two events?

37.Students compare the eight planets and ask why Earth has oceans while Venus and Mars do not. Which comparison is accurate?

38.The Sun is the star at the center of the solar system, and its energy warms Virginia. What process in the Sun releases that energy?

39.Buckingham County produces a blue-bladed metamorphic mineral used in heat-resistant ceramics. It grows in aluminum-rich rock that has been under high pressure. Which mineral is it?

40.Molten rock under a volcano has one name, and the same melt after it spills onto the ground has another. Which pairing is correct?

41.Two igneous rocks contain the same minerals. One has coarse crystals, and the other has fine crystals. What does that difference in texture record?

42.Hikers find marine shells preserved in layered rock and none in a nearby granite. Why are fossils far more common in sedimentary rock?

43.An undisturbed stack of Coastal Plain layers contains marine shells. A deeper layer is compared with the layer directly above it. Which age relationship does superposition give?

44.A dark igneous dike cuts straight through layered rock in the Piedmont, and the layers do not continue through the dike. Which age statement follows from cross-cutting relationships?

45.Sediment once settled onto the flat floor of a shallow sea. Those same layers are now tilted in the Valley and Ridge. What did they look like when they were deposited, and what happened later?

46.Horizontal Coastal Plain beds rest on an eroded surface of much older tilted rock. The contact represents missing time. What is that surface called?

47.A marine animal lived for a geologically short time, spread across many shallow seas, and left abundant shells. How can its fossil help match rock layers in distant outcrops?

48.One statement says a limestone is older than the sandstone above it. Another says a volcanic ash bed is about 200 million years old. Which description of those two statements is accurate?

49.A radioactive parent isotope is locked inside a mineral crystal. One half-life passes. What is the outcome in that crystal?

50.A scientist wants a numerical age for billion-year-old gneiss in the Blue Ridge and for a piece of wood a few thousand years old from a Coastal Plain site. Which method fits the wood, and why does it fail for the gneiss?

51.Some rocks in the Blue Ridge formed more than a billion years ago, long before the limestones of the Valley and Ridge and the sands of the Coastal Plain. Which time span includes those oldest Virginia rocks?

52.Limestone full of marine fossils is folded in the Valley and Ridge, yet people live on dry land there today. What history do those fossils record?

53.The Culpeper basin in the Piedmont holds reddish sedimentary layers, old lava flows, and dinosaur tracks. The basin opened as eastern North America began to pull away from Africa. What tectonic outcome was that?

54.Sands, clays, and shells of the Coastal Plain rest on older crystalline rock of the Piedmont. How does the age of those sediments compare with ancient gneiss in the Blue Ridge?

55.Beneath the lower Chesapeake Bay, shattered rock and a buried circular structure record a violent event about 35 million years ago. What happened?

56.At Richmond the James River drops over rapids, and ships from the bay historically could not continue upstream. Hard Piedmont rock meets softer Coastal Plain sediment there. What is that boundary called?

57.A traveler crosses Virginia from the coal country of the far southwest to the Atlantic beaches. In which order do the physiographic provinces occur from west to east?

58.The Appalachians in Virginia are still high ridges, but the collisions that built them ended hundreds of millions of years ago. Why are they lower and more rounded than a young collision belt?

59.Off Virginia, the seafloor passes from a wide shallow shelf to a slope and then a rise. There is no deep trench and no chain of active volcanoes. What kind of continental margin is this?

60.The Appalachians record an old collision, and the Atlantic has widened since the Mesozoic. What theory ties those outcomes to motion of Earth's outer shell?

61.When two continents collide, neither sinks easily into the mantle, and the crust thickens. What landscape is the usual outcome, and which Virginia mountains are an ancient example?

62.At the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, far east of Virginia, plates move apart and magma rises. What is the rock and age outcome at that boundary?

63.At a transform boundary, two plates slide past each other. Which outcomes fit that sideways motion?

64.An oceanic plate meets a continental plate, and one of them sinks into the mantle. Which plate sinks, and what features can form?

65.Hot rock deep in the mantle slowly rises, and cooler rock slowly sinks. How does that motion connect to the plates?

66.Studies of earthquake waves show that Earth is layered. Which description of those layers is accurate?

67.S waves from a distant earthquake do not travel through Earth's outer core, while P waves do. What does that difference show?

68.Continental crust under the Blue Ridge is compared with oceanic crust under the Atlantic. Which comparison is right?

69.In 2011 a magnitude 5.8 earthquake near Mineral, in Louisa County, shook much of Virginia. Where did it occur relative to a present-day plate boundary?

70.An earthquake starts many kilometers down, and the point on the map directly above that start is near Mineral. What are those two locations called?

71.Three kinds of seismic waves leave an earthquake. Which one arrives first at a distant station, and what can it travel through?

72.Virginia uses sunlight and wind to generate electricity. Why are those resources called renewable?

73.Coal in southwest Virginia and oil and natural gas buried in sedimentary basins share an origin. What process produced these fossil fuels?

74.Earth has a magnetic field that steers many charged particles from the Sun away from the surface. Mars has no matching global field. What process inside Earth maintains the field?

75.Rain that falls in Charlottesville runs into streams that join the Rivanna River and then the James. What is the name for all the land whose water drains to the James?

76.Which set of rivers delivers fresh water from Virginia into the Chesapeake Bay?

77.A drop of rain in southwest Virginia can end in the Gulf of Mexico, while a drop a short distance east can end in the Atlantic. What separates those paths?

78.Below a certain depth in a Coastal Plain well, the pores in the sand are filled with water. What is that underground region called?

79.After a wet spring, water stands higher in a shallow Piedmont well than it did during a dry autumn. The top of the saturated zone has moved. What is that top surface called?

80.Thick sands of the Coastal Plain store water and let it move to wells. A nearby clay layer holds water in tiny pores but lets it move very slowly. Which layer is the better aquifer, and why?

81.A sediment has many open spaces, but the spaces are poorly connected, so water barely moves through it. Which statement names the two properties correctly?

82.At Luray Caverns, calcite formations hang from the ceiling and rise from the floor inside a limestone hill in the Shenandoah Valley. Which pair of processes produced the cave and those formations?

83.On a Valley and Ridge hillside, groundwater flows out where the water table meets the slope. What is that outflow called?

84.A neighborhood in Richmond replaces forest with roofs and pavement. A heavy storm follows. How does that change the rain's path compared with the forested land?

85.Fertilizer from many farms and oil from many streets wash into the Rappahannock River after rain. No single pipe is the source. What kind of pollution is this?

86.Extra nitrogen and phosphorus enter the Chesapeake Bay from rivers. In warm months, algae grow rapidly and then die. What harmful outcome can follow in the deep water?

87.Tidal marshes along the Chesapeake Bay and the peat wetlands of the Great Dismal Swamp stay wet for much of the year. Which outcomes do these wetlands provide?

88.Wells near the bay are pumped harder than fresh groundwater can refill them. Salty water later shows up in wells that used to be fresh. What process occurred?

89.The Chesapeake Bay is partly enclosed by land, rivers dilute the seawater, and the water is linked to the Atlantic. What kind of coastal system is the bay?

90.A boat samples bay water near the mouth of the James River and again near the Virginia capes, where the bay opens to the Atlantic. Where is the salinity generally higher, and what is the bay's mixed water called?

91.Hampton Roads has a regular rise and fall of sea level, typically twice a day. What is the main cause?

92.A fisher on the Eastern Shore sees the highest high tides and the lowest low tides around the new moon and the full moon. What is that larger range called, and why does it happen?

93.Around the first-quarter and third-quarter moons, the difference between high tide and low tide at Virginia Beach is smaller than it was at the full moon. What is that smaller range?

94.Far off Virginia's Atlantic coast, a narrow current carries warm water from the south toward the north. What is that current, and what is one outcome for the air above it?

95.A calm morning at Virginia Beach becomes an afternoon of breaking waves after the wind strengthens and blows across a long stretch of ocean. What transferred energy into those waves?

96.Swimmers at Virginia Beach notice that sand drifts steadily along the shore as waves arrive at an angle. What process moves that sand?

97.A hurricane approaches the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The greatest flooding threat to low streets in Norfolk is a rise of ocean water pushed ashore by the storm, on top of the ordinary tide. What is that rise called?

98.Tide records around Norfolk show local sea level rising faster than the global ocean rise alone would suggest. The land there is also slowly sinking. What is that combined local outcome called?

99.Tangier Island, low land in the Chesapeake Bay, has lost ground along its edges for many years. Which processes are reducing the island?

100.In the Great Dismal Swamp, plant remains pile up in waterlogged ground where oxygen is scarce, and they only partly decay. What material builds up?

101.Clouds, rain, and the jet stream that steers storms across Virginia occur in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where temperature generally falls as altitude increases. Which layer is that?

102.A dry sample of air near Roanoke is separated into its gases. Which two gases make up nearly all of it, with the first one far more abundant?

103.High above Virginia, a form of oxygen absorbs much of the Sun's ultraviolet light. The same molecule near busy roads on a hot day irritates lungs. Which statement places the two outcomes correctly?

104.Earth's surface gives off infrared energy. Certain gases absorb some of that energy and send part of it back downward, keeping the average temperature warmer than it would be with no such gases. What is that process, and what is one outcome of adding more carbon dioxide?

105.A fair, calm afternoon in Charlottesville occurs while air is sinking. A stormy day occurs while air is rising. Which pressure systems match those two outcomes?

106.A hurricane off the Virginia coast has winds spiraling inward toward the storm's low pressure. In the Northern Hemisphere, which way does that spiral turn, and which deflection is responsible?

107.A line of thunderstorms crosses Roanoke, the wind shifts, and the air behind the line is cooler and less humid. Warm, moist air had been in place before the line arrived. What boundary passed?

108.A family in Norfolk notices that the longest days come in late June, yet Earth is nearer the Sun in January, during Norfolk's winter. Which factor sets those seasons?