--- title: What a habitat is: home, food, shelter and fitting in — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «What a habitat is: home, food, shelter and fitting in», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A habitat is the place where a living thing lives and finds everything it needs: the right air or water, food, shelt --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / What a habitat is: home, food, shelter… # What a habitat is: home, food, shelter and fitting in Lesson 1 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/0/) — A habitat is the place where a living thing lives and finds everything it needs: the right air or water, food, shelter and a safe place to raise its young. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/2/) — Every living thing is fitted to its own habitat, so a cactus is built for dry sand and a water lily for a still pond, and swapping them would kill both. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/3/) — A habitat can be huge like a rainforest or tiny like one rotting log, wild like a wood or made by people like a fish tank, a barn or a supermarket car park. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/4/) — In Tom and Jerry, Jerry lives in a hole in the wall and dreams of cheese; real house mice do live in the gaps of our houses, but they would much rather eat seeds, grain and crumbs than cheese. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/5/) — A habitat gives a living thing the right water or air, food, shelter and a safe place to raise young; a pet's keeper must supply all of these in a tank or a cage. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/6/) — Woodlice live in dark, damp places because they are crustaceans, cousins of crabs, with 14 legs (insects such as beetles have 6) and gill-like breathing parts that must stay moist, so dry sunny air can kill them within hours. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/7/) — European robins once followed wild boar and deer that churned up the soil; now they follow gardeners for worms, and both males and females sing in winter to defend a feeding territory. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/8/) — A hermit crab protects its soft, curled body inside an empty sea snail shell and moves into a bigger shell as it grows; crabs sometimes line up by size and swap shells in a chain. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/9/) — The idea that goldfish remember things for only 3 seconds is a myth: experiments show they remember feeding times and tricks for months. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/10/) — Grey squirrels bury thousands of nuts in autumn to eat in winter, and forgotten acorns can grow into new oak trees, so squirrels help plant their own woods. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/11/) — A cactus has thick, waxy, spiny stems that store water for the desert, while a water lily has big flat leaves that float on a pond. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/12/) — Red foxes now live in many towns, where they find food, shelter and few predators (animals that hunt them), eating scraps, worms and rats, and in some British cities there are more foxes per square kilometre than in the countryside. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/13/) — A single fallen tree can be home to hundreds of species of fungi, mosses, beetles, woodlice and centipedes, so nature reserves often leave dead wood lying. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/14/) — Stick insects hide from birds by looking like twigs and even swaying like a twig in the breeze; one from China measured about 64 cm with its legs stretched out. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/15/) — Barn swallows build cup nests of mud and grass under roofs, and those that nest in Britain fly about 10,000 km to southern Africa for the winter, often returning to the same barn. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/16/) — A frog needs two habitats: its tadpoles live in water and breathe with gills, while adult frogs hunt insects on damp land, so losing ponds means losing frogs. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/17/) — Koalas eat almost only eucalyptus leaves, which are tough, low in energy and slightly poisonous and need special gut bacteria to digest, so they rest or sleep up to about 20 hours a day and depend completely on their forest. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/1-what-a-habitat-is/18/) — House mice live in and around buildings and mainly eat seeds, grain and crumbs; the cartoon idea that mice love cheese above everything is not true. - next →: [The rainforest from the top: emergent layer and canopy](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/2-the-rainforest-from-the-top/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)