Chapter 5

This chapter starts to tell readers living things. Earth is the cradle of lives. I will plagiarize what the book says. “viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive”. Life is found almost everywhere on earth-on frozen tundra and on dry desert. Life exists on wave-battered shores, in sunless caves, on windswept mountain peaks, and high in the earth’s atmosphere.

The first question comes to the forefront is what it means to be alive. Living things usually have these characters: adaptation, sensitivity, growth, and reproduction. The basic quality for living things is being able to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. In order to survive the changing environment, living things evolve and get used to the environment. Living things are also sensitive. They can sense tiny changes happening around. This superiority enables them to exist too. Young living things can grow old; however, they give birth to youth. Thus, the young replace the old and generations last.

Biologists distinguish plants and animals into classes. I just write down what I know. Fungi, the mosses, the ferns, and the seed plants are some of the plants classifications. Some animal classifications are sponges, corals, worms, mollusks, the joint-legged invertebrates, animals with backbones. I don’t know the method of classifications. They are hard to understand. It takes two pages of the book to explain them.

The following session deals with real academic problems. There are lots of new and long words. For example, the book expounds photosynthesis which, in my opinion, is a kind of metabolism of plants. I am not going to study in biological science, so I don’t want to have a try of remembering these words. I know I can’t manage them. Let me just record some good metaphors. The leaf is food factory. The stem is transporter and supporter. The root is anchor and absorber. The flower is seed producer. The seed is plant producer.

Although biology is interesting, I am really scared by the words in that area.