Unit 1: Characteristics of life and cells
What is a cell and why is it important for all living things?
A cell is a basic building block of life and it is a smallest unit of the body that can carry our life's processes that keep an organism alive.
What two systems work together to supply the body with oxygen?
Respiratory and circulatory
How is sexual reproductions different from asexual reproduction in plants?
Sexual reproduction: uses gametes (pollen and ovule) from male and female plant using pollination
Asexual reproduction: does NOT use gametes, instead creates offspring from pieces of its stem, leaves or roots.
What is a producer?
A producer is a autotroph (makes it own food using sunlight-plant) that is the base or start of the food chain or web.
What are the 4 bases of DNA?
Adinine
Guanine
Thymine
Cytosine
What scientist came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection through their observations on the HMS Beagle?
Charles Darwin
Which organelle produces energy for the cells int he body?
mitochondria (powerhouse of the cell)
Which body system includes the bladder and kidneys?
Excretory system
What is pollination?
The process of moving pollen from one part of a flower (the stamen) to another part (the pistil), so that the plant can make seeds/reproduce
What is a consumer?
Consumers are organisms that have to eat other living things to get the energy they need to survive (animals, fungi)
In RNA Thymine is switched for which base?
Uracil (U)
What is an adaptation?
A trait or characteristic an organism has that helps it survive better/longer in its environment.
What organelle creates proteins using RNA code?
ribosome
What body system controls understanding and responding to the environment?
Nervous system
What is photosynthesis?
The process plants use to make food (glucose) from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide
Create an example of a food chain that has 5 living organisms
grass -> caterpillar -> mouse -> snake -> hawk
What is the central dogma of biology?
DNA -> RNA -> Proteins
Those proteins are used to make up cells and traits in our bodies and make us look and act a certain way.
Name the 5 steps of natural selection in order
Overproduction, competition, variation, selection, adaptation
Name 2 of the characteristics of life and explain them
Movement, Reproduction, sensitivity, growth, Respiration, excretion, nutrition
*made of cells
What is a reflex?
A reflex is an automatic reaction to a stimulus. Your body preforms this without thinking about it.
What is cellular respiration?
The process cells use to break down food (glucose) to release energy (ATP) for an organism to use
Why are decomposers important to the food web/environment?
Decomposers return nutrients back into the soil so the cycle of matter can continue and so plants can regrow and continue to form the base of the food chains.
What is a mutation?
Explain how a mutation can be bad AND how it can be good.
A mutation is a random change in the DNA code
Good: mutations lead to variation which can help species evolve through natural selection. Sometimes good mutations help organisms survive better
Bad: Mutations can sometimes cause harmful effects, like frame shifts which can harm an organism or kill it because this often can cause important proteins to not be made..
What is fitness in biology?
an organisms ability to survive and reproduce in the environment. This directly is related to how much offspring can be produced in a lifetime.
What 2 organelles would you find in a plant cell, and not in an animal cell?
Cell wall
Chloroplast
What is a stimulus?
Any change in the environment that triggers some sort of the behavioral change in a living organism
What is the male part of a flower
and
What is the female part of a flower?
Male: Stamen (includes anther and filament)
Female: Pistal (includes stigma, style, ovary)
What are the three types of symbiosis.
Give an example.
Mutualism - both benefit (Rhino and oxpecker bird)
Parasitism - one benefit one harmed (dog and tick)
Commensalism - one benefit, one no effect (whale and barnacle)
Describe what happens in the 1st step of PROTEIN SYNTHESIS
Transcription:
DNA is copied into mRNA so the message can leave the nucleus and get to the ribosome.
What is a vestigial structure and how does it provide evidence of evolution?
Vestigial strucutres are body parts that used to be useful in an ancestor organism but are no longer in the current organism. This shows evolution because it shows how the bodies of species changed overtime to no longer need certain parts of the body as they adapted to their new environments.
Using two of the characteristics of life, explain why fire is not alive.
-Fire is not made up of cells, only living things are made up of cells.
-Fire can also not sense and respond to its surroundings. Fire cannot run or respond if you try to put it out. it has no organs or nervous system and it cannot respond to its environment.
Fire can grow, respire, move, and excrete (these will not work as evidence)
Explain the nerve pathway from stimulus to response when you touch a hot pan.
How are photosynthesis and cellular respiration connected. Include the reactants and products of both in your answer.
Photosynthesis takes in sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to produce/make glucose and oxygen
Cellular respiration takes in the oxygen and glucose to make Carbon dioxide, water and ATP.
Photosynthesis then takes the carbon dioxide and water from cellular respiration to go into photosynthesis the keep it going as a cycle.
What is the 10% rule?
The idea that only about 10% of the energy in one trophic level is passed on to the next level in a food chain. The rest is used by the animal and lost as heat.
Describe what happens in the 2nd step of PROTEIN SYNTHESIS
Translation:
mRNA code enters the ribosome, the ribosome reads the code and calls in tRNA which matches mRNA codons to the tRNA anticodons. This brings in the correct animo acids and chains them together to form a protein in the proper order according to the code so the body can use it.
Give two pieces of evidence for why tiktaalik is a common ancestor to all land vertebrates
Fossil record: Fish below tiktaalik in layers, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals above tiktaalik fossil in rock layers
Comparative anatomy: Homologous structures in bones in forelimbs (same bone structure as all land vertebrates - humorous, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges).