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Unit 2 Vocabulary
Characteristics of Living Things & Designing Experiments
Question | Answer |
---|---|
organism | a living thing |
cell | the basic unit of structure and function in living things |
development | change over time to become a more complex organism |
stimulus | a change in an organism's surroundings (causes a response) |
response | an action or change in behavior due to a stimulus |
reproduce | produce offspring that are similar to parents |
spontaneous generation | the mistaken belief that living things can come from nonliving things (disproved by Redi and Pasteur) |
homeostasis | the maintenance of stable internal conditions |
observation | a skill that involves the use of one or more of the senses to gather information and collect data |
inference | an interpretation of an observation that is based on evidence or prior knowledge |
hypothesis | a possible explanation for a set of observations or answer to a scientific question; must be testable |
inquiry | the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world |
qualitative observations | observations that describe the characteristics (qualities) of the subject; often use adjectives |
quantitative observations | observations that incorporate numbers (quantities), such as measurements or counts |
dependent variable | the factor that changes as a result of changes made to the independent variable in an experiment; what you measure |
independent variable | the one factor that a scientist changes to test a hypothesis during an experiment |
controlled experiment | an experiment in which all of the variables except for one remain the same |
constant | factors in an experiment that remain the same |
control group | the sample that remains the same in an experiment; used for comparison |
data | facts, figures, and evidence gathered through observations |