Q1.
Take a closer look at the picture given above. What do you observe? Do you notice that both living beings, like us, and non-living things, like a house, are ultimately composed of atoms?
Answer
The picture shows two chains that start at very different places and end at the same place — atoms.
- Non-living chain: house → room → wall → brick → silicates → atoms.
- Living chain: human body → organ → tissue → cell → protein → atoms.
Yes — both end at atoms. The atoms shown at the centre (C, H, O, N, P, Si) are the same set of elements in both chains. A brick is built mostly of silicates (Si and O); a protein is built of C, H, O, N and S. The kinds of atoms differ and the way they are arranged differs, but there is no special “living matter” made of some other stuff.
Why it happens: what makes a cell alive is not a different type of atom but the organisation — the way carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen are joined into large molecules that can copy themselves and run reactions. Break the arrangement and you are left with ordinary atoms.