Vocabulary Review
Next, in order to truly understand (and you
must to pass the quiz ;) you need to know what the words
mean.
Here comes the......(drumroll).....VOCABULARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
{thank-you, thank-you}.
1. Autotrophs -----------------------------------------------------
organisms, such as plants, fungi, protists, and some bacteria, that
make their own food. They are also known as producers.
2. Heterotrophs ---------------------------------------------------
organisms that consume others for nutritional purposes. To simplify it,
animals such as meat-eaters (carnivores and omnivores) and plant-eaters
(herbivores).
3. Chlorophyll ------------------------------------------------------
green pigments located in chloroplasts.
4. Mesophyll --------------------------------------------------------tissue
in the inside of the leaf.
5. Stomata ------------------------------------------------------------singular:
stoma, which means mouth; they are microscopic pores located on the
leaf. Carbon dioxide enters through it, and oxygen exits (they're like
little noses!).
6. Wavelength -----------------------------------------------------
- distance between the crests of electromagnetic waves that range
from less than a nanometer to more than a kilometer.
7. Electromagnetic spectrum -----------------------------------entire
range of radiation of visible light.
8. Visible light ------------------------------------------------------detected
as various colors by the naked human eye (look around, you it's the COLORS!!!
the COLORS!!!).
9. Photons -----------------------------------------------------------
a non-tangible object (basically, you can't see it with a naked eye
and you are unable to touch it, like the way you can touch and hold onto
a pencil), it is quantum light energy (simply, it's tiny packages
of light).
10. Light reactions --------------------------------------------------they're
the steps of photosynthesis that convert solar energy to chemical energy.
(that's why it's called light reaction because it uses light from
the sun to produce the chemicals needed for the plant to make
food).
11. Calvin Cycle -----------------------------------------------------named
after Melvin Calvin who discovered the steps in the late 1940s along
with his colleagues. This is otherwise known as the dark reaction because
it doesn't need light but only the products of the light reaction (NADPH
and ATP) and carbon dioxide in order to produce sugar.
12. NADP+ -----------------------------------------------------------real
name: nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate. (isn't that cool!! look
at that big word!! impress your friends!!) It's a biproduct of the Calvin
Cycle and is an electron acceptor that temporarily stores the energized
electrons needed for the process to take place (you need energy
in order to do work!).
13. Photophosphorylation ---------------------------------------
a process in which the light reactions also generate ATP by powering the
addition of a phosphate group to ADP.
14. Carbon fixation ------------------------------------------------
the addition of carbon element into other compounds
15. Pigments --------------------------------------------------------
substance that absorbs certain ends of the light spectrum. The most familiar
being chlorophyll (green) and carotenoids (orange).
16. Photorespiration---------------------------------------------
process in certain plants that occurs in the light and accumulates O2,
or oxygen gas.
17. C3 plants -------------------------------------------------------
certain plants that produce a 3-carbon compound as the first product of
carbon fixation. This group include plants important to agriculture,
such as soybeans.
18. C4 plants--------------------------------------------------------
plants that enter the Calvin cycle (i.e. dark reaction) with a different
type of carbon fixation process that produces a 4-carbon compound
as the first product. This group also contain specific plants that are
important to agriculture, such as corn and sugarcane.
19. Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM)
----------------- named after water-storing plants, the family Crassulaceae,
these plants keep the acids that they produce during the night in
their vacuoles until daybreak, when the stomata closes. Examples
of these plants would include many cacti (pl. for cactus), and pineapples,
among some others.
