Paper 2 · Science · Class 8

How Nature Works in Harmony

75 questions · 4 Chapter Tests

About this chapter

How Nature Works in Harmony is the twelfth chapter of Class 8 Curiosity. Opening with elephants entering farms in Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam and Chhattisgarh, it builds the core ecological ideas. A habitat has biotic components (plants, animals, microorganisms) and abiotic components (air, water, soil, sunlight, temperature). A group of the same kind of organism in one habitat is a population; different populations sharing a habitat form a community. Biotic and abiotic components interacting form an ecosystem — aquatic (pond, river, lake), terrestrial (forest, grassland, desert) or human-made (farm, fish pond). Organisms are producers (autotrophs), consumers (heterotrophs — herbivores, carnivores, omnivores) and decomposers (saprotrophs — fungi, bacteria) that recycle nutrients. Food chains show who eats whom; food webs interlink chains; trophic levels are positions in a chain. Relationships also include mutualism, commensalism and parasitism. The chapter ends with threats — Sundarbans loss, Green Revolution overuse, monoculture, pesticides — and the Indian bullfrog case. CTET tests definitions, classification, food chain reasoning, conservation. Four tests — Practice 15, Quiz 15, Hard 15, Mastery 30 — cover these.

Tests in this chapter