How to Use This Set
These 44 questions cover the whole of Chemical Coordination and Integration, in roughly the proportion the chapter itself gives each topic. Four are the definitions and the gland list; three are the hypothalamus; four are the pituitary and its anterior lobe; three are the pars intermedia and the posterior lobe; three are the pineal and the thymus; four are the thyroid and two are the parathyroid; three are the adrenal medulla and three are the adrenal cortex; four are the pancreas; two are the testis and two are the ovary; three are the hormones of the heart, kidney and gastrointestinal tract; and four are the mechanism of hormone action. That weighting follows the chapter. This chapter is one large address grid and one short mechanism at the end, and a student who can read the grid in both directions - gland to hormone and hormone back to gland - and who never names a disorder without naming its direction, 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 gland row in the table rather than to the option - the fix for a wrong answer here is almost always a hormone you had filed under the neighbouring gland, or a disorder whose arrow you had pointing the wrong way.
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 glands, the other real hormones and the other real disorders of this same chapter - and one of them will belong to a completely different part of the body. When you can strike one out, take the guess, and take it quickly. If two glands 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 44 minutes for the 44 questions.
Strip this chapter down and it is one address grid and one short mechanism. The grid is the gland, its hormone, what that hormone does, and what goes wrong when there is too much or too little of it. The mechanism is the last section - receptors, second messengers and gene expression. Almost every item in this set is one row of that grid, and the grid rewards a completely different habit from a mechanism. A mechanism item rewards knowing the sequence. A grid item rewards knowing the address - which gland, which hormone, which action, which direction.
That has a direct consequence for pacing: most items should take 15 to 20 seconds, and anything that has not come in fifteen seconds is not coming by staring at it. A row you have learnt arrives at once. Mark it, move, and come back only if minutes are left over. The exceptions are the match-the-column items and the assertion-and-reason items, and those are worth a full minute each, because they can be worked out rather than recalled - fix one pairing you are sure of, strike out every option that disagrees with it, and the answer usually falls out from two pairings rather than four.
Four habits carry this whole set.
For a disorder item, say the DIRECTION before you look at the options. Every disorder in this chapter is a triple - the hormone, the gland, and whether the fault is OVER-secretion or UNDER-secretion. Half the wrong options are the same disease with the arrow reversed, and the other half are the neighbouring gland's disease. Run the list once now: gigantism - GH, pituitary, OVER, in the growing years. Acromegaly - GH, pituitary, EXCESS in adults, especially in middle age. Pituitary dwarfism - GH, pituitary, LOW. Diabetes insipidus - ADH, UNDER. Goitre - thyroid hormones, UNDER, from iodine deficiency. Cretinism - thyroid hormones, UNDER, during pregnancy. Hyperthyroidism and exophthalmic goitre (Graves' disease) - thyroid hormones, OVER. Addison's disease - adrenal cortex, UNDER. Diabetes mellitus - insulin, UNDER.
For a "which gland secretes this" item, read the grid backwards before you read the options. The chapter teaches gland to hormone; the paper asks hormone to gland. Say the source out loud: melatonin - pineal. Thymosins - thymus. , and thyrocalcitonin - thyroid. PTH - parathyroid. Adrenaline and noradrenaline - adrenal medulla. Cortisol and aldosterone - adrenal cortex. Glucagon - -cells; insulin - -cells. Testosterone - Leydig cells of the testis. Estrogen - growing ovarian follicles; progesterone - corpus luteum. ANF - atrial wall of the heart. Erythropoietin - juxtaglomerular cells of the kidney.
Say both names of a hormone, because the paper uses both. Adrenaline IS epinephrine. Noradrenaline IS norepinephrine. Vasopressin IS ADH. Thyroxine IS tetraiodothyronine, written . An option that uses the other name of a hormone you know is not a new hormone.
Fix the four antagonistic pairs, because they settle a dozen items between them. Insulin lowers blood glucose and glucagon raises it, and they come from two different cells of the SAME gland. PTH raises blood and thyrocalcitonin lowers it, and they come from two DIFFERENT glands - parathyroid and thyroid. Releasing hormones stimulate the pituitary and inhibiting hormones inhibit it, and both come from the hypothalamus. Aldosterone holds and water in while ANF brings blood pressure down.
And keep the four negatives in front of you as you work. The posterior pituitary STORES AND RELEASES oxytocin and vasopressin - the hypothalamus MAKES them. The adrenal MEDULLA is the inner tissue and the CORTEX is outside it. Thyrocalcitonin comes from the THYROID, not the parathyroid. Hormones that use membrane-bound receptors DO NOT ENTER the target cell - they generate second messengers, and the ones named are cyclic AMP, and .