TX: Classification Lesson

The Grocery Store 

Let’s say you wanted to go to the grocery store to buy milk and bread. Since the grocery store is grouped into categories (dairy, meat, vegetables, cereals, etc), it will probably take 5 minutes to locate what you need. Can you imagine how long it would take for you to locate milk and bread if the grocery store was not organized?

As you can see from the grocery store example, a classification system makes it easy to organize, name, and classify the living world.

What is Taxonomy?

Watch the presentation below to learn more about taxonomy. 

Now that you have watched the above video, try and answer the questions below.

Select each one to see the correct answer. 

What is the difference between taxonomy and classification?

Let's take a closer look at Classification:

You may be asking “Why do we need to bother with scientific names anyway”?

Your family and friends would understand what you meant when you said “human” or “dog”.

Is a fancy, hard to pronounce, name really necessary?

Let’s take a look at the example below:

What would you call this organism? Depending on where you live, you may call it a mountain lion, puma, cougar, or panther. These are all common names for the same organism.  Common names can vary among languages and geographical regions. It would be very confusing for scientist to communicate across the world about an organism using common names.

Scientists have also tried to use physical characteristics of an organism attached to the common name to try to be more descriptive, but the names were either too long or scientists differed in the ways that they described physical characteristics. 

This organism has one, universally accepted scientific name: Puma concolor.

You can see that scientific names make it easy to communicate with people from all over the world.

The scientific name, which was developed by Linnaeus, is made up of the Genus and Species taxa. The two-word naming system is called “binomial nomenclature”.

There are a few rules when writing scientific names

• The genus and species are always written in italics or it is underlined.
• The genus name is capitalized, and the species name is uncapitalized.

Classification Challenge and Before You Go

Practice Time! Use the knowledge you learned from the lesson to complete the practice activities below.

Before You Go - You Need To Know

The following key points are from the explore section of the lesson. You must know the following information before moving to the next lesson. This is just a summary of the key points.

1. What is taxonomy?
   • The branch of biology that deals with how organisms are classified.
2. What is classification?
   • A way of grouping organisms based on similar characteristics.
3. Who was Linnaeus?
   • He developed a hierarchy system to classify organisms. Each level is a group of related organisms that are nested in the one above it.
4. What is binomial nomenclature?
   • A two-word naming system that uses the genus and species taxa to provide a scientific name for the organism.

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