100% Free Test Prep MCAT Practice Test Questions

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

A : Braudel’s fascination with obscure facts.

B : Braudel’s depiction of the role of geography in human history.

C : the geography of the Mediterranean region.

D : the irrelevance of national borders.

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

A : no differences from a normal adult.

B : significantly reduced oxygen binding in the lungs.

C : no symptoms, since retention of fetal hemoglobin would be fatal.

D : increased oxygen binding to hemoglobin in the tissues.

Answer: D

Question 3

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

Section: Biological Sciences

A : Spermatogonium

B : Spermatid

C : Zygote

D : Primary oocyte

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

A : the Neanderthal physique became a handicap instead of an advantage.

B : the Neanderthals failed to adapt to climatic changes.

C : the Neanderthals evolved into modern humans.

D : modern humans exterminated the Neanderthals.

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.

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

A : DNA dissolves better in water at lower temperatures.

B : DNA is polar and therefore dissolves better in water than in a mixture of water and ethanol.

C : DNA is nonpolar and therefore dissolves better in ethanol than in water.

D : DNA dissolves well in ethanol and precipitates only because the solution is centrifuged.

Answer: B

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