24 free flashcards
AP Biology Unit 1: Chemistry of Life flashcards
This deck covers the foundation AP Biology builds everything else on: why water is polar and what its hydrogen bonding produces (cohesion, adhesion, high specific heat, floating ice), the four classes of biological macromolecules with their monomers and linkages, dehydration synthesis and hydrolysis, the functional groups that give molecules their chemical behavior, plus two preview cards on enzymes, which the College Board places in Unit 3 but which follow directly from this chemistry.
Unit 1 is a small share of the multiple-choice section on its own, but its content reappears constantly: membrane structure depends on the phospholipid, cellular respiration depends on the phosphate group, gene expression depends on nucleotide directionality, and nearly every free-response question about a protein comes back to amino acids and hydrogen bonding. AP questions rarely ask you to define a term outright — they ask you to explain a consequence, such as why sweating cools you or why a nonpolar mutation buried in a protein core disrupts folding.
The deck
How to study this deck
- For every water property, practice stating the cause and the biological consequence in one sentence: 'hydrogen bonds resist breaking, so water has a high specific heat, which keeps organisms and lakes thermally stable.' AP scoring rewards the causal link, not the label.
- Build a four-column mental table for the macromolecules — monomer, linkage, elements, function — and quiz yourself down the columns rather than across, so you never confuse a glycosidic linkage with a peptide bond.
- Memorize functional groups by the property they confer, not by shape: carboxyl donates a proton and is acidic, amino accepts one and is basic, phosphate carries negative charge and stores transferable energy, hydroxyl makes a molecule water-soluble.