Free Practice Test Prep MCAT Exam Questions 2025

Stay ahead with 100% Free Medical College Admission Test: Verbal Reasoning, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Writing Sample MCAT Dumps Practice Questions

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Total 815 Questions | Updated On: Mar 25, 2025
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Question 1

The rich analyses of Fernand Braudel and his fellow Annales historians have made significant contributions to
historical theory and research. In a departure from traditional historical approaches, the Annales historians,
assume (as do Marxists) that history cannot be limited to a simple recounting of conscious human actions, but
must be understood in the context of forces and material conditions that underlie human behavior. Braudel was
the first Annales historian to gain widespread support of the idea that history should synthesize data from
various social sciences, especially economics, in order to provide a broader view of human societies over time
(although Febvre and Bloch, founders of the Annales school, had originated this approach).
Braudel conceived of history as the dynamic interaction of three temporalities. The first of these, the
evenementielle, involved short-lived dramatic “events,” such as battles, revolutions and the actions of great
men, which had preoccupied traditional historians like Carlyle. Conjonctures was Braudel’s term for larger
cyclical processes that might last up to half a century. The longue duree, a historical wave of great length, was
for Braudel the most fascinating of the three temporalities. Here he focused on those aspects of everyday life
that might remain relatively unchanged for centuries. What people ate, what they wore, their means and routes
of travel – for Braudel these things create “structures” which define the limits of potential social change for
hundreds of years at a time.
Braudel’s concept of the longue duree extended the perspective of historical space as well as time. Until the
Annales school, historians had taken the juridical political unit the nation-state, duchy, or whatever as their
starting point. Yet, when such enormous timespans are considered, geographical features may well have more
significance for human populations than national borders. In his doctoral thesis, a seminal work on the
Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II, Braudel treated the geohistory of the entire region as a “structure”
that had exerted myriad influences on human lifeways since the first settlements on the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. And so the reader is given such arcane information as the list of products that came to
Spanish shores from North Africa, the seasonal routes followed by Mediterranean sheep and their shepherds,
and the cities where the best ship timber could be bought.
Braudel has been faulted for the imprecision of his approach. With his Rabelaisian delight in concrete detail,
Braudel vastly extended the realm of relevant phenomena; but this very achievement made it difficult to delimit
the boundaries of observation, a task necessary to beginning any social investigation. Further, Braudel and
other Annales historians minimize the differences among the social sciences. Nevertheless, the many similarlydesigned studies aimed at both professional and popular audiences indicate that Braudel asked significant
questions which traditional historians had overlooked.
In the third paragraph, the author is primarily concerned with discussing:

Section: Verbal Reasoning  


Answer: B
Question 2

An individual is born with a mutation causing her to partially retain a form of fetal hemoglobin into adulthood.
Compared to a normal individual, this person would exhibit:

Section: Biological Sciences 


Answer: D
Question 3

Which of the following cell types does NOT contain the diploid number of chromosomes?


Section: Biological Sciences  


Answer: B
Question 4

Although we know more about so-called Neanderthal men than about any other early population, their exact
relation to present-day human beings remains unclear. Long considered sub-human, Neanderthals are now
known to have been fully human. They walked erect, used fire, and made a variety of tools. They lived partly in
the open and partly in caves. The Neanderthals are even thought to have been the first humans to bury their
dead, a practice which has been interpreted as demonstrating the capacity for religious and abstract thought.
The first monograph on Neanderthal anatomy, published by Marcelling Boule in 1913, presented a somewhat
misleading picture. Boule took the Neanderthals’ lowvaulted cranium and prominent brow ridges, their heavy
musculature, and the apparent overdevelopment of certain joints as evidence of a prehuman physical
appearance. In postulating for the Neanderthal such “primitive” characteristics as a stooping, bent-kneed
posture, a rolling gait, and a forward-hanging head, Boule was a victim of the rudimentary state of anatomical
science. Modern anthropologists recognize the Neanderthal bone structure as that of a creature whose bodily
orientation and capacities were very similar to those of present-day human beings. The differences in the size
and shape of the limbs, shoulder blades, and other body parts are simply adaptations which were necessary to
handle the Neanderthal’s far more massive musculature. Current taxonomy considers the Neanderthals to have
been fully human and thus designates them not as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis, but as a
subspecies of Homo sapiens: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
The rise of the Neanderthals occurred over some 100,000 years – a sufficient period to account for evolution of
the specifically Neanderthal characteristics through free interbreeding over a broad geographical range. Fossil
evidence suggests that the Neanderthals inhabited a vast area from Europe through the Middle East and into
Central Asia from approximately 100,000 years ago until 35,000 years ago. Then, within a brief period of five to
ten thousand years, they disappeared. Modern human, not found in Europe prior to about 33,000 years ago,
thenceforth became the sole inhabitants of the region. Anthropologists do not believe that the Neanderthals
evolved into modern human beings. Despite the similarities between Neanderthal and modern human anatomy,
the differences are great enough that, among a population as broad-ranging as the Neanderthals, such an
evolution could not have taken place in a period of only ten thousand years. Furthermore, no fossils of types
intermediate between Neanderthals and moderns have been found.
A major alternative hypothesis, advanced by E. Trinkaus and W.W. Howells, is that of localized evolution.
Within a geographically concentrated population, free interbreeding could have produced far more pronounced
genetic effects within a shorter time. Thus modern human could have evolved relatively quickly, either from
Neanderthals or from some other ancestral type, in isolation from the main Neanderthal population. These
humans may have migrated throughout the Neanderthal areas, where they displaced or absorbed the original
inhabitants. One hypothesis suggests that these “modern” humans immigrated to Europe from the Middle East.
No satisfactory explanation of why modern human beings replaced the Neanderthals has yet been found. Some
have speculated that the modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals in warfare; however, there exists no
archeological evidence of a hostile encounter. It has also been suggested that the Neanderthals failed to adapt
to the onset of the last Ice Age; yet their thick bodies should have been heat-conserving and thus well-adapted
to extreme cold. Finally, it is possible that the improved tools and hunting implements of the late Neanderthal
period made the powerful Neanderthal physique less of an advantage than it had been previously. At the same
time, the Neanderthals’ need for a heavy diet to sustain this physique put them at a disadvantage compared to
the less massive moderns. If this was the case, then it was improvements in human culture – including some
introduced by the Neanderthals themselves – that made the Neanderthal obsolete.
All of the following are hypotheses about the disappearance of the Neanderthals EXCEPT:

Section: Verbal Reasoning 


Answer: C
Question 5

A researcher in a molecular biology lab planned to carry out an extraction procedure known as an alkaline
plasmid prep, which is designed to purify plasmids, small pieces of the hereditary material DNA, from bacterial
cells. The bacteria are first placed into a test tube containing liquid nutrient medium and allowed to grow until
they reach a high population density. The culture, which consists of solid cells suspended in the medium, is
then centrifuged; a solid pellet is formed. The supernatant is poured out, leaving the pellet behind, and the cells
are resuspended in a mL of lysis buffer solution (50 mM glucose, 25 mM Tris buffer and 10 mM
ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), with 5 mg of the enzyme lysozyme added). They are then incubated
for 30 minutes at 0° C, during which time the bacterial cell walls break down and the cell contents are released
into the solution. After incubation, 1 mL of 0.4 N sodium hydroxide and 1 mL of 2% sodium dodecyl sulfate
(SDS) are added, and the solution is again incubated on ice for 10 minutes. 2 mL of 3 M sodium acetate are
added and the mixture is incubated for 30 minutes at 0° C. The test tube is centrifuged once more and the
supernatant is decanted into a clean tube, leaving behind the protein and most other cell components in the
pellet.
Finally, 10 mL of pure ethanol are added to the supernatant from the previous step to precipitate out the DNA,
and the test tube is incubated at −20° C for 60 minutes, during which the mixture remains liquid. The mixture is
centrifuged a final time and the supernatant removed. The translucent precipitate that results is washed with
70% ethanol (70% ethanol and 30% water by volume), allowed to dry, and resuspended in 1 mL of TE buffer
(10 mM Tris, 1 mM EDTA).
In preparation for this experiment, the researcher prepared stock solutions of the various chemicals that she will
need in the experiment. Stock solutions are highly concentrated solutions of commonly used chemicals in water
from which dilute solutions are prepared for daily use. Table 1 shows the chemicals, their molecular formulas
and weights, and the composition of commonly used stock solutions.
MCAT-part-3-page300-image175
Which of the following conclusions can be reached based on the fact that DNA precipitates in the last step of
the plasmid prep procedure?

Section: Physical Sciences 


Answer: B
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Total 815 Questions | Updated On: Mar 25, 2025
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