Living Systems and the Environment
These are the four levels of organization in an ecosystem.
What are organism, population, community, and ecosystem?
Although some ocean pollution is the result of natural occurrences, most pollution is related to this type of activity.
What is human activity?
In this, water vapor enters atmosphere by evaporation from the oceans and other bodies of water and leaves by precipitation or by condensation on the ground.
What is the water cycle?
Earth's atmosphere consists of these three main gasses (along with water vapor and other gasses, there are also particles of liquids and solids).
What are nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide?
The environment of the Grand Canyon can be thought of as this; a group of parts that work together as a whole.
What is a system?
These three describe the energy role an organism might play in its ecosystem.
What is that of a producer, a consumer, or a decomposer?
Not only does its organisms provide food for human consumption, but it also provides materials that are used in products such as detergents and paints.
What is the ocean?
This property can be measured with an instrument called a psychrometer.
What is relative humidity?
Because air has this, it also has other properties, including density and pressure.
What is mass?
These are the four main spheres of Earth.
What are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, and the biosphere?
This overlapping pattern demonstrates feeding relationships, or food chains among the various organisms in an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
The sun's energy warms the ocean's surface and the atmosphere near the equator more than near the poles. The resulting temperature differences in ocean water, along with differences in salinity, drive these currents within the ocean.
What are convection currents?
Scientists have classified clouds into three main types, based on their shape:
What are cirrus, cumulus, and stratus?
A barometer (buh RAHM uh tur) is an instrument that is used to measure this atmospheric quality.
What is air pressure?
These are the two types of forces that shape the land surface by building up mountains and other landmasses and by wearing away landmasses through the process of weathering.
What are constructive and destructive forces?
In nature, the main way that individuals join a population and leave a population are by these methods.
What are birth and death?
As the temperature of the water near the poles decreases and its salinity increases, the water becomes denser and sinks. Then, the cold, dense water flows back along the ocean floor as a deep current. Like surface currents and winds, deep currents curve because of this effect.
What is the Coriolis effect?
This is an overflowing of water in a normally dry area.
What is a flood?
At the top of a mountain, the air pressure is less than the air pressure at sea level. Altitude, or elevation, is the distance above sea level. Air pressure decreases as altitude increases. As air pressure decreases, this happens to its density.
What is density decreases?
These are the three major types of landforms.
What are plains, mountains, and plateaus?
These are the two major types of interactions among organisms and populations.
What are are competition and predation?
Changes in wind patterns and currents can have a major impact on the oceans and nearby land. One example of such changes is this; a climate event that occurs every two to seven years in the Pacific Ocean when an unusual pattern of winds forms over the western Pacific causing a vast sheet of warm water to move east toward the South American coast.
What is El Nino?
These four are the major types of air masses that influence the weather in North America.
What are maritime tropical, continental tropical, maritime polar, and continental polar?
Nearly all the energy in Earth's atmosphere comes from the sun. These special waves travel to Earth in a form of energy that can move through the vacuum of space.
What are electromagnetic waves?
One shows a geographical area on paper, while the other represents the world on a sphere that rotates on an axis. Both are drawn to scale and use symbols to represent features on Earth's surface.
What are maps and globes?