Cumulus clouds are large, puffy, mid-altitude clouds with a flat base and a rounded top. These clouds grow upward and can develop into a cumulonimbus or thunderstorm cloud.

An ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. This includes both the biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living).

Force is applied to change an object's speed or direction of motion.

The gene is the base unit of inheritance and is contained within DNA. A gene may come in several varieties (alleles) and there are a pair of alleles for every gene. If the alleles are alike, a person is homozygous for that gene. If the alleles are different, heterozygous.

The columns of the Periodic Table are called groups and all elements in a group have the same number of electrons in their outer electron shell. The group that an element occupies generally determines its chemical properties as the number of outer shell electrons establishes the way it reacts with other elements to form molecules. So, because each element has the same number of electrons in its outer shell, each has similar reactivity.

Smaller rocks shed by asteroids and comets are called meteoroids. When these rocks reach Earth's atmosphere, they burn up in the mesosphere and become meteors. If a meteor manages to reach the Earth, it is called a meteorite.

When two air masses meet and neither is displaced, a stationary front is created. Stationary fronts often cause persistent cloudy wet weather.

Tertiary consumers eat primary consumers and secondary consumers and are typically carnivorous predators. Tertiary consumers may also be omnivores. Examples include wolves, sharks, and human beings.

Velocity and displacement are vector quantities which means each is fully described by both a magnitude and a direction. In contrast, scalar quantities are quantities that are fully described by a magnitude only. A variable indicating a vector quantity will often be shown with an arrow symbol: \(\vec{v}\)