Terrestrial Environments Vocabulary Study Guide
Environment: Everything that surrounds and influences an organism.
An environment includes both living and nonliving things.
Example: The terrarium we set up was an environment for plants, bugs
and beetles.
Environmental factor: An environmental factor is one part of an
environment. It can be living, such as plants or animals, or nonliving such
as soil, air and water.
Example: Water is an environmental factor that helps plants survive.
Terrarium: A mini garden in an enclosed container.
Example: We set up terrariums in class.
Organism: Any living thing including plants and animals.
Example: Pea plants, isopods, bacteria and humans are all organisms.
Germinate: When a seed sprouts and begins to grow.
Example sentence: We did not see our seeds begin to germinate because
they were below the soil.
Variable: Something that can be changed.
Example: In our last experiment, we did every step the same, except for
the amount of water added to the soil. Water was the variable we were
looking at for the differences in the growth of our seeds.
Preferred environment: The set of environmental conditions an
organism seems to select over other conditions
Example: Most of our plants seemed to choose moist soil as their
preferred environment because that’s where they showed the best growth.
Controlled experiment: A set of experiments that are compared to each
other, in which one variable is changed through the steps, while all other
variables are kept the same
Example: When we set up the experiment with the different soil
environments, we did every step the same except for the amount of
moisture in the soil. That was a controlled experiment.
Range of tolerance: The different conditions of one environmental factor
in which an organism can survive
Example: The range of tolerance for corn plants is moist to very wet soil,
while the range of tolerance for barley is moist to wet soil.
Optimum: The best condition of one environmental factor in which an
organism can grow, develop and reproduce
Example: The optimum water tolerance level in the soil for pea plants is
moist.