The crust and the rigid lithosphere (upper mantle) is made up of approximately thirty separate plates. These plates more very slowly on the slightly more liquid mantle (asthenosphere) beneath them. This movement has resulted in continental drift which is the gradual movement of land masses across Earth's surface. Continental drift is a very slow process, occurring over hundreds of millions of years.

Unlike curved mirrors that operate on the principle of reflection, lenses utilize refraction. A convex lens is thicker in the middle than on the edges and converges light while a concave lens is thicker on the edges than in the middle and diffuses light. A common use for curved lenses is in eye glasses where a convex lens is used to correct farsightedness and a concave lens is used to correct nearsightedness.

A vibrating object produces a sound wave that travels outwardly from the object through a medium (any liquid or solid matter). The vibration disturbs the particles in the surrounding medium, those particles disturb the particules next to them, and so on, as the sound propagates away from the vibration.

Heredity is the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another. Heredity is made possible via large strings of chromosomes which carry information encoded in genes.

Momentum is a measure of how difficult it is for a moving object to stop and is calculated by multiplying the object's mass by its velocity:  \(\vec{p} = m\vec{v}\).  Like velocity, momentum is a vector quantity as it expresses force applied in a specific direction.