Human Body Quiz

About this test

Anatomy sticks far better when learned by function than as a list of parts. An organ becomes memorable once you know what it puts out and what it takes in: the liver makes bile, the gallbladder stores it, the small intestine uses it to break down fats. Three organs, one chain, and the three can never be confused again. The same approach works everywhere else in the body.

A handful of numbers are worth fixing once and for all, because they come up constantly: four chambers in the heart, seven cervical vertebrae, twelve pairs of ribs, thirty-two adult teeth, three lobes in the right lung against two in the left — that asymmetry exists simply because the heart takes up room on the left. These figures are stable and uncontested, and they clear away about half the traps.

Be wary, though, of the “records” that circulate everywhere: strongest muscle, toughest organ, fastest cell. Depending on whether you measure absolute force, pressure exerted, or force relative to size, the answer changes — so those questions have no single correct answer and this quiz asks none of them. The longest bone really is the femur and the smallest really is the stapes, because there you are measuring length and nothing else.