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A Chapter That Rewards Memory, Not Reasoning
Most biology chapters ask you to understand a process. This one does not. Nobody has ever worked out from first principles that an adult has 206 bones — you either carry the number or you lose the mark. That makes the skeletal system the cheapest scoring block in general science, and the most annoying one to lose.
So study it as a table, not as a story. Four groups of facts cover essentially every question ever set: the counts (bones, vertebrae, ribs), the record-holders (longest, smallest, hardest), the joints and where each one sits, and the connective tissues that hold the whole thing together.
The skeleton itself does five jobs — shape, support, protection of the brain, heart and lungs, movement with the muscles, and manufacture of blood cells in the red bone marrow. That last one surprises candidates who think of bone as dead scaffolding. It is living tissue with its own blood supply.
1. How many bones are there in the body of a normal adult human being?
2. Which is the longest and strongest bone in the human body?
3. The joint at the elbow is an example of a:
4. How many cervical (neck) vertebrae does a giraffe have?
5. Which bone of the human body does not articulate with any other bone?
6. Muscle is attached to bone by:
7. In the human rib cage, which pairs of ribs are called 'floating ribs'?
8. The smallest bone in the human body is: