Biology · Variety of life. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.
Classification puts organisms into groups by their similarities. The basic unit is the species: a group of organisms that can interbreed freely in nature and produce fertile offspring. Similar species are placed in a genus, similar genera in a family, and so on upwards to a kingdom. Each group is called a taxon.
Every species has a scientific name of two words, a system called binomial nomenclature. The same name is used in every country, so there is no confusion from local names.
The number of kingdoms has grown as more was learnt about cells: from two (plants and animals) to three and then to the five-kingdom system used in the textbook.
Students swap class and order, or family and order, in the hierarchy. Learn the fixed sequence kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and remember that the genus is the first word of the name.
Answer: Zea mays is correct; Zea is the genus and mays is the species name.
Type what you are stuck on. The helper finds the explanation, worked examples and the notes to read, free and instant.
← Nucleus and prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellsViruses →Take a Biology test