Cambridge Primary Checkpoint 0846 · Topic 5 of 10

Habitats, food chains and the environment

How living things depend on their habitat and on each other, food chains, adaptation, and how people affect the environment.

📌 Key points

A habitat is the place where a living thing lives. It gives it food, water, shelter and space.
An ecosystem is all the living things in an area together with their environment.
A food chain shows what eats what. The arrows show the direction the energy moves: grass → rabbit → fox.
Food chains start with a producer, a green plant that makes its own food using light from the Sun.
Consumers eat other living things. Herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat animals and omnivores eat both.
A predator hunts other animals for food. The animals it hunts are its prey.
Living things are adapted to their habitats: a polar bear has thick fur and a layer of fat, and a cactus stores water in its stem.
Decomposers, such as bacteria and fungi, break down dead plants and animals and return nutrients to the soil.
People can harm the environment (pollution, cutting down forests) or protect it (recycling, nature reserves).

Habitat: The natural home of a living thing.
Producer: A living thing that makes its own food, such as a green plant.
Consumer: A living thing that eats other living things.
Predator: An animal that hunts and eats other animals.
Prey: An animal that is hunted and eaten by another animal.
Adaptation: A feature that helps a living thing survive in its habitat.
Decomposer: A living thing that breaks down dead material, such as fungi and bacteria.
Food web: Several food chains linked together.

Look at the food chain grass → grasshopper → frog → snake. What would happen if all the frogs died?

Frogs eat grasshoppers, and snakes eat frogs.
With no frogs, fewer grasshoppers are eaten, so the number of grasshoppers would go up.
The snakes lose their food, so the number of snakes would go down.
More grasshoppers would eat more grass, so there would be less grass.
Answer: grasshoppers increase, snakes decrease and the grass decreases.

💡 Test tip

In a food chain the arrow means "is eaten by". It always points towards the animal that does the eating.

Test yourself8 questions from a bank of 22. A new mix every time.