NEET-Pattern Practice Questions

How to Use This Set

These 40 questions cover the whole of Body Fluids and Circulation, in roughly the proportion the chapter itself gives each topic. Nine of them are plasma and the formed elements; five are the blood groups and the Rh factor; three are coagulation; two are lymph; four are the circulatory patterns and the vertebrate heart; seven - the largest single block - are the anatomy of the human heart and its nodal tissue; six are the cardiac cycle and the ECG; two are double circulation and the blood vessels; and two are the regulation of cardiac activity and the disorders. That weighting is not arbitrary. The heart, its addresses and its numbers carry this chapter, and a student who can place every valve and every node on the correct side, and reproduce the counts, the percentages, the durations and the volumes exactly as printed, has already earned most of what this chapter is worth.

Sit the whole set in one go, and look nothing up. Answer every question in order, and mark every question where you were choosing between two options rather than certain. Those marked questions, not only the wrong ones, are your revision list afterwards. Check the answers only at the end, and when you check, go back to the number or the address rather than to the option - the fix for a wrong answer here is almost always a figure or a location you had not fixed in memory.

The marking is +4 for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong one, and it is worth doing that arithmetic once. With four options and one of them right, a blind guess wins 4 marks once in every four attempts and loses 1 mark on the other three, so four blind guesses are worth about +1 mark between them - almost nothing, for four questions' worth of time. Cut the options down to two and the same four attempts are worth about +6. So the rule is not "never guess". It is never guess blind, and never spend time on a guess. On this chapter you can usually strike out at least one option at sight, because the wrong options are the other real numbers of the chapter - a different percentage, a different count, a different duration - and one of them will be a figure that belongs to a completely different quantity. When you can strike one out, take the guess, and take it quickly. If all four numbers still look alike after fifteen seconds, leave it blank and keep the minute.

These are exam-pattern practice questions built on the chapter's recurring core facts. They are not authenticated year-tagged previous-year papers.

Before You Start

Give yourself 40 minutes for the 40 questions.

This is a numbers-and-addresses chapter. Almost nothing here is reasoned out. Every question is a value, a location, an order or a direction - what percentage, how many per cubic millimetre, which corner of which atrium, which valve on which side, what closes first. That has a direct consequence for pacing: most items should take 15 to 25 seconds, and anything that has not come in fifteen seconds is not coming. A number or an address you learnt arrives at once or not at all; staring at four percentages will not pull one out. Mark it, move, and come back only if minutes are left over. The exceptions are the arithmetic items - a cardiac output to be multiplied out, a cycle duration to be divided out, a cell count to be taken as a percentage of a total - and those are worth a full minute each, because they are the ones you can be certain about.

Four words decide the address questions in this chapter, and they are right, left, first and second. Read the whole phrase before you answer, because each of those words appears in a place where it does not mean what the eye expects.

• Right and left as a SIDE of the heart. The tricuspid valve guards the opening between the RIGHT atrium and the RIGHT ventricle. The bicuspid or mitral valve guards the opening between the LEFT atrium and the LEFT ventricle. Both options are always offered and the whole question is that one word.
• Right and left as a CORNER of one chamber. The sino-atrial node sits in the right upper corner of the RIGHT atrium, and the atrio-ventricular node in the LOWER LEFT CORNER of that same RIGHT atrium. "Lower left corner" describes a corner, not a chamber - the AVN is not in the left atrium, and an option that puts it there is the trap the phrase was written to set. Both nodes are in the right atrium.
• First and second as a HEART SOUND. The first sound, lub, is the closure of the tricuspid and bicuspid valves. The second sound, dub, is the closure of the semilunar valves. Pair them aloud once and the swap cannot happen.
• First and second as a PREGNANCY. In the first pregnancy of an Rh negative mother the two bloods are well separated by the placenta and the foetus is safe; the exposure happens at the delivery of that first child, and the danger is to the subsequent pregnancies.

Three more habits carry this set. 1. For a value question, say the quantity before you look at the numbers - 6000-8000 is a WBC count, 1,50,000 to 3,50,000 is a platelet count, 5 million to 5.5 million is an RBC count, and the options will offer you all three. 2. For an inactive-to-active pair, name the direction - fibrinogen becomes fibrin, prothrombin becomes thrombin, never the other way round. 3. For an ECG wave, say depolarisation or repolarisation out loud - P is atrial depolarisation, QRS is ventricular depolarisation, T is ventricular REPOLARISATION, and the T-wave is where the mark is lost.