click below
click below
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Topic 5: Vocabulary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Organism | Any living thing. |
| Habitat | An environment that provides the things a specific organism needs to live, grow and reproduce. |
| Biotic Factors | The parts of a habitat that are or were once alive and that interact with an organism. |
| Abiotic Factors | The nonliving parts of an organism's habitat. |
| Population | All the members of one species living in a particular area. |
| Community | All the different populations that live together in an area. |
| Ecosystem | The community of organisms that live in a particular area, along with the nonliving environment. |
| Limiting Factor | An environmental factor that causes a population to stop growing or to decrease in size. |
| Producer | An organism that can make its own food. |
| Consumer | An organism that obtains energy by feeding on other organisms. |
| Decomposer | Organisms that break down biotic wastes and dead organisms, returning the raw materials to the ecosystem. |
| Food Chain | A series of events in which one organism eats another and obtains energy and nutrients. |
| Food Web | The many overlapping food chains in an ecosystem. |
| Energy Pyramid | A diagram showing the amount of energy that moves from one feeding level to another in a food web. |
| Law of Conservation of Mass | The principle that matter is neither created nor destroyed during any chemical or physical change. |
| Law of Conservation of Energy | The rule that energy can not be created or destroyed. |
| Evaporation | The process by which molecules at the surface of liquid water absorb enough energy to change to a gas. |
| Condensation | The process of a gas changing to a liquid. |
| Precipitation | Any form of water that falls from clouds and reaches Earth's surface as rain, sleet, snow, or hail. |