Question

What are the characteristics of life?

Answer 1

Life refers to the traits, condition, or manner that distinguishes a living organism from dead things. The term can apply to either an alive being or the activities in which living things participate. Life is a phenomenon in which physical components that have biological functions are distinguished from those that do not have life.

Complete answer:
The following are the seven characteristics of life:
1. Responding to the environment: Living things are aware of their surroundings and react to shifts in the environment.
2. Growth and change: All living things have the capacity to change and evolve.
3. Reproduction: Every biological entity must be able to multiply. Reproduction is the action of producing a future generation, and it can be either sexual or asexual.
4. Complex chemistry: The biochemistry of all living beings is complicated. Metabolism is the term used to denote all chemical events in a cell.
5. Homeostasis: Despite changes in their exterior environment, living creatures regulate their internal settings within a defined range (they retain a constant intrinsic condition). This is known as homeostasis, and it is a crucial feature of all living creatures.
6. Nutrition: The biochemical and physiological mechanism by which an organism uses food to sustain its life is known as nutrition.
7. Excretion: It is a process in which the metabolic wastes are eliminated from the body.

Note:
A living thing actively draws or absorbs energy from its surroundings, increasing entropy in the process. A life form thus appears to withstand the consequences of entropy on its own existence by extracting energy from the surroundings.