Biology · IGCSE · Cambridge · Cambridge IGCSE (9–1) Biology 0970 (Extended) (2026–2028) · Specification point · 19.2 · Organisms and their environment
19.2 Food chains and food webs
| Core | Supplement |
|---|---|
1 Describe a food chain as showing the transfer of energy from one organism to the next, beginning with a producer | |
2 Construct and interpret simple food chains | |
3 Describe a food web as a network of interconnected food chains and interpret food webs | |
4 Describe a producer as an organism that makes its own organic nutrients, usually using energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis | |
5 Describe a consumer as an organism that gets its energy by feeding on other organisms |
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6 State that consumers may be classed as primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary according to their position in a food chain |
7 Describe a herbivore as an animal that gets its energy by eating plants |
8 Describe a carnivore as an animal that gets its energy by eating other animals |
9 Describe a decomposer as an organism that gets its energy from dead or waste organic material |
10 Use food chains and food webs to describe the impact humans have through overharvesting of food species and through introducing foreign species to a habitat |
11 Draw, describe and interpret pyramids of numbers and pyramids of biomass | 15 Draw, describe and interpret pyramids of energy |
12 Discuss the advantages of using a pyramid of biomass rather than a pyramid of numbers to represent a food chain | 16 Discuss the advantages of using a pyramid of energy rather than pyramids of numbers or biomass to represent a food chain |
13 Describe a trophic level as the position of an organism in a food chain, food web or ecological pyramid |
14 Identify the following as the trophic levels in food webs, food chains and ecological pyramids: producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers and quaternary consumers |
17 Explain why the transfer of energy from one trophic level to another is often not efficient |
18 Explain, in terms of energy loss, why food chains usually have fewer than five trophic levels |
19 Explain why it is more energy efficient for humans to eat crop plants than to eat livestock that have been fed on crop plants |