Cells and Organisms
This tiny, microscopic structure is known as the basic building block of all living things.
What is a cell?
This fundamental water cycle process happens when liquid water absorbs thermal energy and turns into water vapor.
What is evaporation?
These organisms, such as plants and phytoplankton, form the base of the food web by making their own food via photosynthesis.
What are producers?
This process occurs when invisible water vapor cools down high in the atmosphere and turns back into liquid water droplets, forming clouds.
What is condensation?
Found only in plant cells, this green organelle captures sunlight to make food through photosynthesis.
What is a chloroplast?
This global driving force, caused by the unequal heating of Earth's surface by the sun, moves air from high to low pressure areas.
What is wind?
This overlapping, complex diagram shows all the interconnected feeding relationships and paths of energy transfer within an entire ecosystem.
What is a food web?
Driven entirely by gravity, this is the downhill movement of liquid water across Earth's surface after the ground can no longer absorb it.
What is surface runoff?
This organelle acts as the "brain" or control center of the cell, housing the organism's genetic material (DNA).
What is the nucleus?
This layer of gases surrounds Earth, trapping heat and protecting life from harmful solar radiation.
What is the atmosphere?
Organisms like fungi and bacteria play this crucial role by breaking down dead organic material and recycling nutrients back into the soil.
What are decomposers?
This is the specific process where plants absorb water through their roots and release it as water vapor into the air through tiny pores in their leaves.
What is transpiration?
This level of biological organization is formed when a group of similar cells work together to perform a specific function.
What is a tissue?
While weather changes day to day, this term describes the long-term regional patterns of temperature and precipitation over decades.
What is climate?
This term describes any non-living physical or chemical component of an ecosystem, such as sunlight, temperature, water, or soil.
What is an abiotic factor?
These two powerful natural forces drive the entire global water cycle by moving water up into the atmosphere and pulling it back down to Earth.
What are solar energy (the Sun) and gravity?
Unlike single-celled amoebas, organisms like humans and trees are classified as this because they are made of many specialized cells.
What is a multicellular organism?
Caused by Earth's rotation, this effect deflects moving air and ocean currents to the right in the Northern Hemisphere.
What is the Coriolis effect?
This ecological term refers to the maximum population size of a species that a specific environment can sustainably support based on available resources.
What is carrying capacity?
This is the term for water that seeps deep into the soil and is stored in the spaces and pores between underground rocks and sediment.
What is groundwater (or an aquifer)?