Question Video: Identifying Environmental Effects of Saprophytism | Nagwa Question Video: Identifying Environmental Effects of Saprophytism | Nagwa

Question Video: Identifying Environmental Effects of Saprophytism

Fill in the blanks: Saprophytism is important for environmental _? Without it, the bodies of dead organisms would remain without _ and _ would not be recycled for use by other _. Put the words in the correct order to complete the paragraph.

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Video Transcript

Fill in the blanks. Saprophytism is important for environmental what. Without it, the bodies of dead organisms would remain without what and what would not be recycled for use by other what. Put the words in the correct order to complete the paragraph. Nutrients, balance, organisms, decomposing.

To answer the question, let’s start by thinking about the first blank: “Saprophytism is important for environmental what.” An environment is the surroundings of an organism and includes the living and nonliving factors in the environment. So, for example, a camel’s environment is a desert. An environment can either be balanced or unbalanced. The normal state is for an environment to be in balance. It is kept in balance by the interactions between its living and nonliving factors. For example, predators keep the environment in balance by keeping the numbers of prey down. And plants keep the environment in balance by producing food that other organisms eat.

Saprophytes, like bacteria and fungi, also help maintain environmental balance. So, the first blank is “balance.”

To fill in the other blanks, let’s look at how saprophytes help keep environmental balance. When an organism, like our camel, dies, it is broken down by decomposers. Saprophytes are a type of decomposer. Without them, dead bodies, like this dead camel, would remain without decomposing. So, the second blank is “decomposing.”

As the organism is being broken down or decomposed by saprophytes, such as bacteria and fungi, the nutrients it is made from are returned to the soil or in this case sand. So, the third blank is “nutrients.” These nutrients can then be used by other organisms. For example, plants can absorb these nutrients and then pass them on to organisms that eat them. So, the fourth blank is “organisms.”

So, the correct order of words to complete the paragraph is balance, decomposing, nutrients, organisms, which gives us the following paragraph “Saprophytism is important for environmental balance. Without it, the bodies of dead organisms would remain without decomposing and nutrients would not be recycled for use by other organisms.”

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