Nt1310 Unit 1 Assignment

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1. Life is considered life because of a few rules that all life follows, if you are an organism and one of these statements doesn’t apply to you more than likely you are not a living organism. The characteristics of all life are, “Living things are made of cells, Living things obtain and use energy, Living things Adapt and Evolve, Living things reproduce, Living things respond to their environment, Living things made of DNA, and Living things have Homeostasis”. Starting with the first one, all living things are made of cells, it doesn’t matter if you have 1 cell or 100,000,000 cells you are living (if you check the rest off as well). Next, if you obtain and use energy, is also really straight forward. A grain of sand does not obtain or even use energy so therefore it can’t be alive. If a organism can Adapt and evolve to survive a situation then it is living. Living things must reproduce, now if you are the last of your kind or species then clearly you can’t make more (unless you reproduce asexually) but that does not mean you are not a living thing, if you have the ability to reproduce then you are getting a check mark on this section. Responding to the environment is key for a organism to survive, a organism uses stimulus that lets them know …show more content…
A virus is not alive based on the information above, all the facts point to this answer. As the characteristic notes explained you must have all of the characteristics of life to be “alive” and a virus does not have all of them. The biggest and main difference is that a virus must be inside another host cell in order to reproduce which raises the question, does that even count as reproducing? If you can only reproduce in certain conditions then you do not get a check in this section because it is a what if question. That if a virus got into a host cell, then it would reproduce, what if it didn’t get in a host cell, and then it would not reproduce. On top of this viruses do not respire and do not have a cellular