Characteristics of Living Things Quiz

Characteristics of Living Organisms

• One characteristic shared by all living things is the ability to grow and develop.
• Growth involves a permanent increase in size and mass in living organisms.

Nutrition and Energy

• Organisms that make their own food using energy from sunlight are called autotrophs.
• Organisms that cannot make their own food and consume others instead are called heterotrophs.

Reproduction

• The characteristic that involves the process of making more of the same kind of organism is called reproduction.

Cell Structure

• Organisms made up of more than one cell are called multicellular organisms.

Classification of Living Organisms

• The process of grouping living things based on their similarities is called taxonomy.
• Taxonomists consider fossils and comparative anatomy to reveal the evolutionary relationships of organisms.
• Biologists classify organisms into different categories based on their shared characteristics.
• The science of naming, identifying, and classifying organisms is known as taxonomy.
• The internal and external structures of living organisms influence their classification.

History of Taxonomy

• Carl Linnaeus is known as the father of taxonomy.
• The three domains into which biologists divide the diversity of life are Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya.
• In the Linnaean classification system, the phylum is ranked immediately below the kingdom.
• The Greek philosopher Aristotle developed the first widely accepted biological classification systems.
• The term for the process of arranging various organisms into successive levels of biological classification is taxonomy.