Photosynthesis Jeopardy

Along with sunlight, this gas, absorbed from the air through the leaves, is a key raw material for photosynthesis.

What is carbon dioxide?

This liquid, absorbed by the roots and carried up through the plant, is the other key raw material for photosynthesis.

What is water?

This sugar, produced during photosynthesis, stores chemical energy that the plant can use later.

What is glucose?

This gas is released as a byproduct of photosynthesis and is essential for animals to breathe.

What is oxygen?

This term describes reactions, like photosynthesis, that absorb more energy from their surroundings than they release.

What is an endothermic reaction?

This green pigment, found inside chloroplasts, absorbs sunlight to power photosynthesis.

What is chlorophyll?

These flattened, coin-like sacs inside a chloroplast, stacked like pancakes, hold chlorophyll and capture light.

What are thylakoids?

This fluid-filled space surrounding the stacks of thylakoids is where sugar-building reactions take place in a chloroplast.

What is the stroma?

This is the general term for a stack of thylakoids inside a chloroplast.

What is a granum?

This set of light-independent reactions uses carbon dioxide and stored energy to build sugar in the stroma.

What is the Calvin cycle?

This flat, usually green part of a plant is the primary site where photosynthesis takes place.

What is a leaf?

This waxy, protective layer coats the surface of a leaf and helps reduce water loss.

What is the cuticle?

This tissue, made of tightly packed cells near the top of a leaf, holds most of the leaf's chloroplasts and does most of its photosynthesizing.

What is the palisade layer?

These tiny veins running through a leaf carry water in and carry sugar out to the rest of the plant.

What are veins?

These paired cells surround each tiny leaf pore and change shape to open or close it.

What are guard cells?

This form of energy, captured by chlorophyll, powers the reactions of photosynthesis.

What is light energy?

Chlorophyll reflects this color of visible light rather than absorbing it, which is why most leaves look this color.

What is green?

This class of yellow and orange pigments, also found in chloroplasts, helps capture light energy and gives carrots and autumn leaves their color.

What are carotenoids?

These clusters of chlorophyll and other pigments inside the thylakoid membrane capture light energy and kick off the reactions of photosynthesis.

What are photosystems?

This diagram plots how effectively each wavelength of light drives photosynthesis, showing chlorophyll works best with red and blue light.

What is an absorption spectrum?

This process, which happens mainly in the mitochondria, releases energy stored in sugar and is essentially the reverse of photosynthesis.

What is cellular respiration?

This energy-carrying molecule is produced by cellular respiration and powers most of a cell's activities.

What is ATP?

This organelle carries out cellular respiration, just as the chloroplast carries out photosynthesis.

What is the mitochondrion?

Unlike cellular respiration, which runs around the clock, photosynthesis only happens during this condition, when the sun is out.

What is daylight?

On a global scale, this cycle describes how carbon moves between the atmosphere, living things, and the ocean, driven largely by photosynthesis and respiration.

What is the carbon cycle?

In a food chain, plants and other organisms that make their own food using photosynthesis are called this.

What are producers?

This term describes an organism, like an animal, that cannot make its own food and must eat other organisms for energy.

What is a consumer?

This large, densely treed biome, home to more than half of Earth's land species, produces roughly one fifth of the planet's oxygen through photosynthesis.

What is the rainforest?

These microscopic, floating algae and bacteria in the ocean carry out a large share of the planet's total photosynthesis.

What is phytoplankton?

This term describes the total amount of new plant matter, such as wood, leaves, and roots, produced by photosynthesis in an ecosystem over a given time.

What is primary productivity?