Memly's AP® Biology Core Concepts: 300 Free Study Cards

300 cards from water chemistry to ecosystems, tagged by topic.

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pH	Definition: A logarithmic measure of hydrogen ion concentration, running from 0 to 14 with 7 neutral. Why it matters: Because the scale is logarithmic, a change of one unit is a tenfold change in hydrogen ion concentration, which is why small pH shifts denature proteins.
Monomer and polymer	Definition: A monomer is a single subunit, and a polymer is a chain of many of them linked together. Why it matters: Three of the four macromolecule classes are polymers, so the same two reactions build and break nearly everything in a cell. Often confused with: Lipids, which are not true polymers because their subunits are not joined in a repeating chain.
Saturated fatty acid	Definition: A fatty acid whose carbon chain holds the maximum number of hydrogens, with no double bonds. Why it matters: Straight chains pack tightly, so these fats are solid at room temperature and stiffen membranes.
Purines and pyrimidines	Definition: Purines are the double-ring bases adenine and guanine, and pyrimidines are the single-ring bases cytosine, thymine, and uracil. Why it matters: A purine always pairs with a pyrimidine, which keeps the width of the double helix constant along its whole length.
Water potential	Definition: The free energy of water per unit volume, which predicts the direction water will move. Rule: Water always moves from higher water potential to lower water potential, and pure water at standard pressure is defined as zero. Why it matters: It combines solute effects and pressure effects into one number, which osmosis alone cannot do for a walled cell.
Substrate concentration and reaction rate	Definition: The relationship in which rate rises with substrate concentration and then levels off. Why it matters: The plateau means every active site is occupied, so at saturation only adding enzyme raises the rate further.
Autotroph	Definition: An organism that builds its own organic molecules from inorganic carbon. Why it matters: Autotrophs are the entry point for both energy and carbon into an ecosystem, which is why they occupy the base of every food web.
Metabolic rate	Definition: The total energy an organism uses per unit time. Measured by: Oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production, or heat released, all of which track the same underlying process.
Absorption spectrum and action spectrum	Definition: An absorption spectrum plots how much light a pigment absorbs at each wavelength, while an action spectrum plots how effectively each wavelength drives photosynthesis. Why it matters: The two curves resemble each other but do not match exactly, and the gap is evidence that pigments other than chlorophyll a also contribute.
Hormone	Definition: A chemical messenger released by one tissue that acts on cells elsewhere in the body carrying the matching receptor. Why it matters: Hormones are slow and long-lasting compared with nerve signals, which is why they govern growth, development, and metabolism rather than reflexes.
Action potential	Definition: A rapid, self-propagating reversal of membrane voltage that travels along a neuron. Why it matters: It is all-or-none, so a stronger stimulus is encoded as a higher firing frequency rather than as a larger signal.
Signal amplification	Definition: The growth in the number of activated molecules at each step of a transduction pathway. Why it matters: It is why a hormone present at very low concentration can produce a large cellular response, and why receptor number rather than ligand number often limits the effect.
Innate immune response	Definition: The fast, non-specific defenses present from birth, including barriers, phagocytes, and inflammation. Why it matters: It recognizes broad molecular patterns shared by many pathogens, so it responds within minutes but does not improve with repeated exposure.
Homologous chromosomes	Definition: The maternal and paternal copies of the same chromosome, carrying the same genes at the same loci but not necessarily the same alleles. Why it matters: Their pairing and separation in the first meiotic division is what produces haploid cells and what independent assortment acts on.
Binary fission	Definition: Prokaryotic cell division, in which a circular chromosome is replicated and the two copies are drawn apart as the cell elongates and divides. Often confused with: Mitosis, which needs a spindle and a nuclear envelope to break down. Binary fission uses neither.
Linked genes	Definition: Genes close together on the same chromosome, which therefore tend to be inherited as a unit. Why it matters: They violate independent assortment, so a dihybrid cross gives an excess of parental combinations and a shortfall of recombinants.
Restriction enzyme	Definition: A bacterial enzyme that cuts DNA at a specific short sequence. Why it matters: Many leave staggered single-stranded ends, so fragments from two different sources can be joined by base pairing.
Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium	Definition: The condition in which allele and genotype frequencies stay constant from generation to generation. Why it matters: It is a null model rather than a description of reality, so its value is that a departure from it is evidence that something is acting on the population.
Gradualism	Definition: The view that evolutionary change accumulates slowly and steadily over long spans of time. Often confused with: A claim about mechanism. Both gradualism and punctuated equilibrium use the same mechanisms and differ over tempo.
Homologous structures	Definition: Structures shared by different species because both inherited them from a common ancestor. Example: The same bone arrangement in a human arm, a whale flipper, and a bat wing, despite very different uses.
Abiotic synthesis hypothesis	Definition: The proposal that simple organic molecules formed on the early Earth from inorganic precursors before any life existed. Why it matters: Laboratory experiments passing energy through mixtures of simple gases produce amino acids and other monomers, showing the step is chemically possible.
Levels of ecological organization	Definition: The nested scales of ecological study, from individual organism to population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere. Why it matters: Each level adds one kind of interaction, since a community adds other species and an ecosystem adds the nonliving surroundings.
Keystone species	Definition: A species whose effect on community structure is far larger than its abundance would suggest. Why it matters: Removing it changes the whole community, which is how the concept is demonstrated experimentally.
Carbon cycle	Definition: The movement of carbon among the atmosphere, living organisms, soils, oceans, and rock. Why it matters: Photosynthesis and respiration move it in opposite directions on a short timescale, while burial and combustion move it on a much longer one.
Eutrophication	Definition: The enrichment of a body of water with nutrients, leading to algal blooms and then to oxygen depletion as the blooms decay. Why it matters: The fish die from lack of oxygen rather than from the nutrients, so the damage arrives one step after the cause.
Mean	Definition: The sum of the values divided by the number of values. Why it matters: It is pulled by extreme values, so a single outlier can move it well away from the typical measurement.
Null hypothesis	Definition: The statement that there is no real difference or association, and that any observed one is due to chance. Why it matters: A statistical test evaluates this statement rather than the interesting one, so the outcome is a decision to reject it or not.
Gas exchange surface	Definition: The thin, moist, highly folded surface across which an animal exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide. Why it matters: Gases must dissolve to diffuse, so the surface has to stay wet, which is why terrestrial animals keep it internal.
Antigen	Definition: A molecule the immune system recognizes as foreign and responds to. Often confused with: A pathogen. The antigen is usually one molecule on a pathogen's surface rather than the organism itself.
Sliding filament model	Definition: The explanation of muscle contraction in which thick and thin filaments slide past one another without changing length. Why it matters: The sarcomere shortens while its filaments do not, which is why the model is stated in terms of overlap rather than shrinkage.

이 덱 소개

The hard part of this course is not any single topic. It is that the topics are graded on how they connect, so a definition you can recite still leaves you stuck when a question asks what happens to the recessive phenotype frequency when a population stops mating at random, or why an energy pyramid cannot be inverted. These 300 cards are built for that. Each one gives a clean definition and then a second line that makes it usable, most often why the idea matters in practice, and where two ideas are routinely swapped, the card names the other one instead of restating the first. Coverage runs across water and macromolecules, energetics and enzymes, cell communication and homeostasis, chromosomes and heredity, gene expression and biotechnology, evolution and phylogeny, ecology, and the experimental design and statistics that show up in data questions. Cell structure and the molecular machinery — organelles, membranes, respiration and photosynthesis step by step, mitosis, replication, transcription and translation — live in the Cell Biology Essentials deck instead, so the two are built to be used together. Cards carry a topic tag, so you can drill just heredity, just evolution, or just ecology instead of the whole course. Import it and the deck joins your spaced-repetition schedule, and the concepts that keep slipping keep coming back until they stop slipping.

자주 묻는 질문

Can I import the whole deck on the free plan?: Yes. Importing a saved deck runs no new AI generation and spends no AI credits, so the free plan imports every card. You can study, edit and delete them afterwards.
Will importing it twice create duplicates?: No. Cards you already have are skipped and only cards added in a revision come through. Including re-imports after deleting it, one official deck can be imported three times per account.
Does it work on the web and in the mobile app?: Yes. The deck is added to your account, so the web app, the iOS app and the Android app all show the same cards and the same progress.
How is it organized for studying one topic at a time?: Every card carries a topic tag and a finer one below it, across chemistry of life, cells and transport, energetics, cell communication, chromosomes, heredity, gene expression, biotechnology and viruses, evolution, ecology, experimental design and organismal systems. Filter by a tag to drill one block.
How does this differ from the Cell Biology Essentials deck?: That deck goes deep on one subject, covering organelles, membranes, transport and the molecular machinery in detail. This one is broad, putting its largest share of cards on heredity, evolution, ecology and data analysis, which that deck does not cover at all. No card here repeats a card there.
Which topics get the most cards?: Chemistry of life 48, evolution 44, ecology 44, heredity 34, energetics 26, cell communication 20, organismal systems 20, gene expression 18, biotechnology and viruses 16, experimental design 16, chromosomes 10, cells and transport 4. The weighting is heaviest where a course asks you to connect ideas rather than recall one, and the cell material sits in the Cell Biology Essentials deck instead.
Does it cover the data and statistics questions?: Yes, as its own block of 16 cards rather than scattered through the biology: 6 on designing an experiment, 5 on describing data, and 5 on inference including the chi-square test, degrees of freedom and what a significance threshold does and does not mean. The four Hardy-Weinberg cards sit in evolution, where the calculation actually gets used.
Can I edit the cards after importing?: Yes. Once imported they are your cards: edit either side, delete the ones your course does not cover, retag them, or move them into another deck.

AP® and Advanced Placement® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this deck. No official questions or course framework text are reproduced, and every card is written by Memly. Compiled 2026-08-21.