| A | B |
|---|
| producers | an organism that can make its own food |
| consumers | an organism that obtains energy by feeding on other organisms |
| herbivores | a consumer that eats only plants |
| carnivores | a consumer that eats only animals |
| omnivores | a consumer that eats both plants and animals |
| scavengers | a carnivore that feeds on the bodies of dead organisms |
| decomposers | an organism that breaks down chemicals from wastes and dead organisms and returns important materials to the soil and water |
| food chain | a series of events in which one organism eats another to obtain energy |
| food web | the pattern of overlapping food chains in an ecosystem |
| energy pyramid | a diagram that shows the amount of energy that moves from one feeding level to another in a food web |
| water cycle | teh continuous process by which water moves from Earth's surface to the atmosphere and back |
| carbon cycle | the movement of carbon from the nonliving environment into living things and then back inot the nonliving environment; producers take in carbon dioxide gas from the air during photosynthesis |
| nitrogen cycle | nitrogen moves from the air to the soil, into living things, and back into the air |
| evaporation | the process by which molliquic absorb energy and change it to a gas |
| nitrogen fixation | the process of changing nitrogen gas into forms that plants can use |
| precipitation | rain, snow, sleet, hail |
