7.3: Similarities are used to classify organisms since they may be used to infer the degree of relatedness among organisms. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.3.1: Recognize and describe that a key distinction among organisms is between autotrophs, such as green plants (which use energy from sunlight to make their own food), and heterotrophs, such as animals and fungi (which consume other organisms as food and harvest energy from them).

Food Chain
Forest Ecosystem

7.3.2: Recognize and describe that biological classifications are based on how organisms are related: Organisms are classified into a hierarchy of groups and subgroups, with species the most fundamental unit.

Dichotomous Keys
Human Evolution - Skull Analysis

7.4: All living things are composed of cells, from just one to many quadrillions, whose details usually are visible only through a microscope. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.4.1: Investigate and explain that all living things are composed of one or more cells; cells are organisms' basic units of structure and function; and cells come only from existing cells (Theodor Schwann's and Matthias Schleiden's cell theory).

Paramecium Homeostasis

7.4.2: Describe that the way in which cells function is similar in all living organisms.

Paramecium Homeostasis

7.4.3: Explain that in those cells that contain a nucleus (eukaryotic plant and animal cells), the nucleus is the main repository for genetic information.

RNA and Protein Synthesis

7.4.5: Know intracellular bodies with specific functions are called organelles. Describe that important among them are mitochondria which liberate energy for the work that cells do, and chloroplasts which capture sunlight energy for photosynthesis.

Cell Energy Cycle
Cell Structure

7.4.6: Describe that plant cells have chloroplasts and a cellulose cell wall, and animal cells do not.

Cell Structure

7.4.9: Explain how cells in multicellular organism continually divide to make more cells for growth and repair, and various organs and tissues function to serve the needs of cells for food, air, and waste removal.

Digestive System

7.4.11: Construct a chart and describe that multicellular organisms are organized hierarchically from cells to tissues to organs to organ systems to organisms.

Circulatory System
Digestive System

7.5: Every organism requires information in the form of a set of instructions that specifies its traits. Those traits may be modified by environmental influences. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.5.1: Describe that heredity is the passage of information for developing and maintaining the organism's body from one generation to another, that genes are the basic units of heredity, and they are made of DNA, consisting of very long molecules located in the chromosomes of each cell.

Human Karyotyping
Mouse Genetics (One Trait)
Mouse Genetics (Two Traits)

7.5.2: Explain how, in asexual reproduction, offspring are an almost identical copy of the mother cell.

Inheritance

7.6: Biological evolution accounts for the diversity of species developed through gradual processes over many generations. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.6.1: Describe that biological variation (phenotype variation) is the raw material on which natural selection operates.

Evolution: Mutation and Selection
Evolution: Natural and Artificial Selection
Natural Selection
Rainfall and Bird Beaks

7.6.2: Explain how Darwin's research and that of his followers supported a concept of differential survival in terms of fitness (i.e., given the potential exponential increase of offspring and the only linear potential increase of resources, favorable variations which aid individual organisms in their survival in a given environment will confer on those organisms a greater reproductive success for that variety).

Evolution: Mutation and Selection
Evolution: Natural and Artificial Selection

7.6.3: Describe how biological evolution results primarily from the action of natural selection on the available variation in a population of organisms.

Evolution: Mutation and Selection
Evolution: Natural and Artificial Selection

7.6.4: Explain how independent lines of evidence drawn from geology, fossils, comparative anatomy, and molecular biology provide the firm basis of evolutionary theory.

Human Evolution - Skull Analysis

7.7: Human beings have body systems for obtaining and providing energy, defense, reproduction, and the coordination of body functions. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.7.1: Describe the specific functions and roles of each major human body system, including digestive, respiratory, excretory, reproductive, circulatory, nervous, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and immune system.

Circulatory System
Digestive System

7.7.5: Identify specific examples of how viruses, bacteria, fungi, and more complex parasites may infect the human body and interfere with normal body functions.

Disease Spread
Virus Lytic Cycle

7.8: Organisms in ecosystems exchange energy and nutrients among themselves and with the physical environment. As a basis for understanding this concept, students:

7.8.1: Recognize that in all environments, such as freshwater, marine, forest, desert, grassland, mountain, farms, cities, and others, organisms with similar needs and living strategies compete with one another for resources, including food, space, water, air, and shelter.

Forest Ecosystem
Prairie Ecosystem

7.8.2: Describe how two types of organisms may interact in a competitive or cooperative relationship, such as producer/consumer, predator/prey, parasite/hosts, or as symbionts.

Food Chain
Forest Ecosystem
Prairie Ecosystem

7.8.3: Illustrate and explain how plants use the energy from light to make simple sugars, and more complex molecules, from carbon dioxide and water through a process called photosynthesis. Understand this produces food that can be used immediately or stored for later use.

Cell Energy Cycle
Photosynthesis Lab

7.8.4: Create a food web to explain how energy and matter are transferred between producers and primary consumers and secondary consumers.

Forest Ecosystem

7.8.5: Describe how organisms that eat plants break down the plant structures to produce the materials and energy that they need to survive, and in turn, other organisms consume them.

Food Chain
Forest Ecosystem
Prairie Ecosystem

7.8.6: Explain how dead plants and animals, broken down by other living organisms, especially microorganisms and fungi, contribute to the cycling of matter through the system as a whole.

Forest Ecosystem

7.8.7: Describe how, as any population of organisms grows, it is held in check by one or more environmental constraints (e.g., depletion of food or nesting sites, increased numbers of predators or parasites).

Food Chain

7.8.10: Recognize that entire species may prosper in spite of the poor survivability or bad fortune of individuals.

Rainfall and Bird Beaks