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Classifying Living Things organisms in the same kingdom

have things in common. For
If you like music, you might have
example, all plants are autotrophs.
some CDs, or songs loaded onto an
mp3 player, and they may not be
in any particular order. This fine if
you don’t have that many CDs or
songs, but if you get a lot of them,
you’ll probably need to start
organizing them, by doing things
like putting all the CDs by the
same artist in the same spot, or

organizing the songs
The five kingdoms of life
alphabetically.

Organizing things into groups is
called classification. If Animals in a kingdom are broken

classification is needed for a down into groups based on
collection of songs, imagine how similarities. Each of these groups
badly it is needed with organisms. is called a phylum. From here,
things get more and more specific,
There so many kinds of living
as you can see below:
things – many more than there are
songs on even the biggest music- kingdom phylum class
lover’s mp3 player. So how can order family genus species
they be organized? Scientists have
Each organism has a scientific
been working on this problem for
name, which is created by putting
several hundred years. This has
together the name of the genus
led to a detailed system to classify
and species.
organisms.
In a scientific name, the genus is
First, living things are classified
capitalized and the species is
into kingdoms. Kingdoms are
written in lower case.
things like animals, plants, or
Scientific names are always
funguses. All in all, there are five
underlined or written in italics.
named kingdoms, although current
These names can be very useful
science indicates that there may
when communicating around the
need to add more kingdoms as are
world about a particular organism.
more organisms are discovered
and described. Kingdoms include For example, a dog is called perro
many organisms, but all the in Spanish and chien in French.

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