GCSE Biology Characteristics of Living Things Organisms 2026 27 exams

in today's video we're going to be looking at the characteristics of living things which we can also call organisms so basically we're going to cover the set of features that all living organisms have in common whether it's an animal plant bacteria fungi or protocolist now there are seven key features that you need to know about and help you remember them we can use the acronym mrs gran where each letter stands for one of the features they need to know so those are movements respiration sensitivity growth reproduction excretion and nutrition one thing to say before we start is that non-living things may also have some of these features for example crystal can grow and car can move but the important point to remember is that only living things have all the seven features so if you start with movement this one's pretty self-explanatory it just refers to the ability of organisms to move and that could be whole organism like cow moving its entire body as it walks around field or it could be something like plant that only moves part of its body for example when it turns its leaves towards the sun next up we have respiration this is set of chemical reactions that take place in our cells in order to break down nutrient molecules like sugars and release energy that we can use for metabolism and if you haven't heard of metabolism before it just refers to all of the chemical processes that occur within an organism to keep it alive so basically all the reactions that are going on inside us all the time and respiration is what provides the energy that's needed for all those reactions for sensitivity we can describe this one as the ability to detect and respond to changes in the internal or external environment so this is the idea that we can detect things like changes in temperature which we can then respond to by doing something like sweating or shivering but all other organisms can do this as well for example plants can detect water light intensity temperature and lot more and they can respond to each of them something to point out here though is that you might sometimes see this point as sensitivity and control as the responding to changes part can be thought of as an organism's ability to control their internal environment so basically by detecting any changes and then responding to them they can control their internal environment like their temperature their water levels their ph levels all that kind of stuff next we have growth which is also fairly self-explanatory and it just means that organisms can grow and get larger or in technical terms we could describe it as permanent increase in size and dry mass with dry mass just meaning the mass of an organism once you remove all the water so for cat growth could mean going from kitten to an adult cat or for bacteria which is just single cell it just means going from smaller cell to larger cell then we have reproduction which we can describe as the process that makes more of the same kind of organism like cat having kittens or large bacteria dividing into two smaller bacteria next we have excretion you might not be as familiar with this one but basically it just refers to the removal of the waste products of metabolism and also substances that are in excess of requirements so if you break this down the first bit means getting rid of waste products like urea and carbon dioxide which we produce but don't really want then this other bit refers to getting rid of things that we do sometimes need but only get rid of when we have more than we need so this would include things like water and mineral ions we need water and mineral ants to survive but sometimes we have too much of them so we have to get rid of the excess that we don't need then finally the last feature on our list is nutrition which is the taking in of materials for energy growth and development so for most animals that basically means eating and drinking to get all the nutrients and energy that we need whereas for fungi or bacteria it would mean absorbing nutrients from the surroundings by either diffusion or active transport and that's it these are the seven features that all the living things have in common and anything that meets all of these criteria can be called an organism one other thing that all living organisms have in common though is that they're made up of one or more cells and we'll take look at these structural cells in another video also remember that viruses don't actually count as living things even though some people call them organisms they're actually not because they don't meet the seven requirements we just mentioned for example they don't grow over time and they don't excrete waste in any way so they're not considered living organisms anyway that's everything for this video so hope that was helpful for you if you want to practice questions on this or anything else in science or maths then head over to our revision site which you can access by pressing the link in the top right 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