Anatomy
What the domain covers
Anatomy in this paper covers the skeletal and muscular systems: bone types and functions, joint classification, major joint movements, and the three muscle types. Questions often ask you to identify a joint, classify a bone or name the movement at a joint.
Core content
- The adult skeleton has 206 bones: axial skeleton 80 and appendicular skeleton 126.
- Bone types: long (femur, humerus), short (carpals, tarsals), flat (scapula, sternum, ribs), irregular (vertebrae, facial bones) and sesamoid (patella).
- Functions: support, protection, movement, mineral storage and blood-cell formation.
- Joints: fibrous (sutures), cartilaginous (intervertebral discs, pubic symphysis) and synovial. Synovial types include hinge (elbow, knee), ball-and-socket (shoulder, hip), pivot (atlas-axis, radioulnar), saddle (thumb carpometacarpal), gliding (carpals) and condyloid (wrist).
- Muscle types: skeletal (striated, voluntary), smooth (non-striated, involuntary) and cardiac (striated, involuntary). A tendon attaches muscle to bone; a ligament attaches bone to bone.
Worked example
Classify the shoulder and elbow joints and give one movement at each. The shoulder is ball-and-socket because a rounded head fits a cup-like cavity; it allows flexion, extension, abduction, rotation and circumduction. The elbow is hinge because movement is mainly flexion and extension in one plane. The reasoning rests on joint surfaces and the number of planes of movement, not on the limb's location.
Traps that cost marks
Reversing tendon and ligament; calling the knee a ball-and-socket joint; treating the thumb joint as hinge; and confusing bone types, such as calling the patella a flat bone instead of a sesamoid bone.