Biology Final vocab
Terms
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- Science
- organized way of using evidence to learn about the natural world; also, the body of knowledge that scientists have built up after years of using this process
- Observation
- use of one or more of the senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and sometimes taste—to gather information
- Data
- evidence; information gathered from observations
- Inference
- logical interpretation based on prior knowledge and experience
- Hypothesis
- possible explanation for a set of observations or possible answer to a scientific question
- Spontaneous generation
- hypothesis (disproven) stating that life could arise from nonliving matter
- controlled experiment
- a test of the effect of a single variable by changing it while keeping all other variables the same
- manipulated variable
- factor in an experiment that a scientist purposely changes; also known as independent variable
- responding variable
- factor in an experiment that a scientist wants to observe, which may change in response to the manipulated variable; also known as a dependent variable
- theory
- well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations
- biology
- science that seeks to understand the living world
- cell
- collection of living matter enclosed by a barrier that separates the cell from its surroundings; basic unit of all forms of life
- sexual reproduction
- process by which cells from two different parents unite to produce the first cell of a new organism
- asexual reproduction
- process by which a single parent reproduces by itself
- metabolism
- set of chemical reactions through which an organism builds up or breaks down materials as it carries out its life processes
- stimulus
- a signal to which an organism responds
- homeostasis
- process by which organisms maintain a relatively stable internal environment
- evolution
- change in a kind of organism over time; process by which modern organisms have descended from ancient organisms
- metric system
- decimal system of measurement based on certain physical standards and scaled on multiples of 10
- microscope
- device that produces magnified images of structures that are too small to see with the unaided eye
- compound light microscope
- microscope that allows light to pass through a specimen and uses two lenses to form an image
- electron microscope
- microscope that forms an image by focusing beams of electrons onto a specimen
- cell culture
- group of cells grown in a nutrient solution from a single original cell
- cell fractionation
- technique in which cells are broken into pieces and the different cell parts are separated