Four Spheres
This sphere includes all living things on Earth, like plants, animals, and people.
What is the biosphere?
All the living and nonliving things in an area that interact with each other.
What is an ecosystem?
A simple path that shows how energy goes from one organism to another.
What is a food chain.
Almost all the energy in food webs originally comes from this source.
What is the sun.
The process plants use to turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.
What is photosynthesis?
This sphere is made of all of Earth’s water, including oceans, lakes, rivers, and ice.
What is the hydrosphere?
These are nonliving parts of an ecosystem like sunlight, water, rocks, and air.
What are abiotic factors?
A complex network of many connected food chains in an ecosystem.
What is a food web.
An animal that eats only plants is called this.
What is a herbivore (primary consumer)
When living things take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide to get energy from food.
What is cellular respiration (or respiration)?
Rocks, mountains, soil, and the ocean floor are part of this sphere.
What is the Geosphere
These living things depend on other organisms for food, shelter, and resources.
What are organisms (or living things in an ecosystem)?
These organisms make their own food using sunlight, like plants and algae.
What are producers?
An animal that eats other animals is called this.
What is a carnivore (secondary/tertiary consumer)?
True or false: The amount of matter on Earth mostly stays the same and is recycled through ecosystems.
What is true.
Air, gases, and weather all belong to this sphere around Earth.
If a disease kills many rabbits in a grassland, what might happen to the fox population that eats them?
The fox population decreases because they lose a food source.
These organisms must eat other organisms to get energy.
What are consumers?
A hawk eats a snake that ate a mouse that ate grass. What consumer level is the hawk?
What is a tertiary consumer (top consumer)?
When plants and animals die, decomposers return this to the soil for plants to use again.
What are nutrients (or matter like minerals)?
A forest fire sends smoke into the air and burns trees. Name two spheres interacting.
What are the biosphere and atmosphere.
Name one way humans can change an ecosystem and explain one effect on living things.
Cutting down trees can reduce animal habitats and decrease biodiversity.
These organisms break down dead plants and animals and return nutrients to the soil.
What are decomposers.
As energy moves from one level of a food chain to the next, does all the energy get passed on? Explain.
No, only some energy is passed on; much is lost as heat or used for life processes.
Explain how matter cycles but energy flows in one direction in an ecosystem.
Matter is recycled between organisms and the environment, but energy flows in one direction from the sun through producers, consumers, and decomposers and is lost as heat.