NEET-Pattern Practice Questions

How to Use This Set

These 40 questions cover the whole of Locomotion and Movement, in roughly the proportion the chapter itself gives each topic. Five of them are the types of movement and the three muscle types; six are the structure of a skeletal muscle down to the sarcomere; five are the contractile proteins; six are the sliding filament theory; three are the red and white fibres; seven - the largest single block - are the axial skeleton; five are the appendicular skeleton and the girdles; two are the joints; and one is the disorders. That weighting follows the chapter. The muscle mechanism and the bone counts carry this chapter between them, and a student who can walk the ten steps of contraction in order and rebuild every bone count from its parts 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 table or the step list rather than to the option - the fix for a wrong answer here is almost always a count you had not fixed in memory or a step you had put in the wrong place in the sequence.

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 counts of the chapter - a different bone count, a different number of vertebrae, a different band - and one of them will be a figure that belongs to a completely different structure. 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.

Strip this chapter down and it is a mechanism and a count stitched together. The mechanism is the sliding filament theory - ten steps from the signal in the motor neuron to the pumping back of the calcium ions. The count is the skeleton - 80 axial bones, 126 appendicular bones, 206 in all. Almost every item in this set is one step of that mechanism or one row of that count, and the two halves reward completely different habits. The muscle items reward knowing the sequence - what comes immediately before and immediately after the event in the stem. The skeleton items reward knowing the sums - what the parts add up to, and what has to be doubled before they will.

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 by staring at it. A step you learnt in order arrives at once. Mark it, move, and come back only if minutes are left over. The exceptions are the arithmetic items - an axial total to be rebuilt, a limb total to be broken up, a set of vertebral regions to be added, a number of pairs to be turned into a number of bones - and those are worth a full minute each, because they are the ones you can be certain about. A bone count you are unsure of can be rebuilt from 80 and 126 rather than guessed, and that is the single most useful thing to carry into this paper.

For a muscle item, walk the sequence and stop at the step the stem names. Do not scan the four options first. Start at the motor neuron and go forward - motor neuron, neuromuscular junction, acetyl choline, action potential, calcium released, troponin unmasked, cross bridge formed, actin pulled inwards, new ATP breaks the bridge, calcium pumped back - and take the step that fits. Each event happens once and in one place, so the first fit is the only fit.

For a skeleton item, write the two sums in the margin before you answer anything.

• Axial 80 - skull 22, hyoid 1, ear ossicles 6, vertebrae 26, sternum 1, ribs 24.
• Appendicular 126 - fore limbs 60, hind limbs 60, pectoral girdle 4, pelvic girdle 2.
• Total 206 - and 80 + 126 = 206 closes the check.

Two rows break the sum if you forget to double them. The ear ossicles are 3 in EACH middle ear, so 6. The ribs are 12 PAIRS, so 24 bones. A student who enters 3 and 12 lands on 65, decides he has misremembered the 80, and changes a count that was right.

Three more habits carry this set. 1. For a band question, say what the band contains before you look at the options - the 'I' band is thin filaments only, the 'A' band is the whole length of the thick filaments, the 'H' zone is thick filaments only. 2. For a count question, say what is being counted before you look at the number - 22 is the skull, 26 is the vertebral column, 24 is the rib bones, 30 is one limb, and the paper will offer you all four in the same list. 3. For a comparison question, say the odd row first - white fibres have MORE sarcoplasmic reticulum than red fibres, and that one row settles most of the red-against-white items on its own.