General Science Flash Card Set 419021

Cards 10
Topics Blood Flow, Consumers, Meteoroids, Plate Tectonics, Primary Consumers, Producers, Reproduction, Scavengers, Vectors

Study Guide

Blood Flow

To provide oxygen to the body, blood flows through the heart in a path formed by the right atrium → right ventricle → lungs → left atrium → left ventricle → body. When blood enters the right side of the heart it is deoxygenated. It enters the left side of the heart oxygenated after traveling to the lungs.

Consumers

Most animals consume other organisms to survive. Consumers (heterotrophs) are divided into three types, primary, secondary, and tertiary, based on their place in the food chain.

Meteoroids

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.

Plate Tectonics

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.

Primary Consumers

Primary consumers (herbivores) subsist on producers like plants and fungus. Examples are grasshoppers, cows, and plankton.

Producers

Producers (autotrophs) serve as a food source for other organisms. Typical producers are plants that can make their own food through photosynthesis and certain bacteria that are capable of converting inorganic substances into food through chemosynthesis

Reproduction

During intercourse, the penis ejaculates sperm, produced in the testes, into the vagina. Some of the sperm makes their way to the uterus where, if they encounter an egg to fertilize, unite with the ovum to form a fertilized egg or zygote. The zygote then may implant in the uterus and eventually develop into a fetus.

Scavengers

Like decomposers, scavengers also break down the dead bodies of plants and animals into simple nutrients. The difference is that scavengers operate on much larger refuse and dead animals (carrion). Decomposers then consume the much smaller particles left over by the scavengers.

Vectors

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: \(\vec{v}\)