--- title: The microscopic world: cells, the building blocks of life — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The microscopic world: cells, the building blocks of life», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Every living thing is built from cells, tiny living bricks far too small to see with your eyes alone; you are ma --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/) [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/) / The microscopic world: cells, the buil… # The microscopic world: cells, the building blocks of life Lesson 256 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 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/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/0/) — Every living thing is built from cells, tiny living bricks far too small to see with your eyes alone; you are made of tens of trillions of them. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/1/) — Put one drop of pond water under a school microscope and a whole hidden world swims into view: slipper-shaped paramecia rowing with tiny hairs, amoebas flowing like blobs of jelly, green algae, each of them just one single cell. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/2/) — A single cell can eat, move and make copies of itself by splitting in two; that is how your scraped knee heals, as new skin cells divide and fill the gap while the scab protects the wound on top. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/3/) — Inside each cell's nucleus is DNA, a long instruction book that tells the cell what to do; stretched out, the DNA of one cell would be about two metres long, yet it is so thin and so tightly coiled that it fits into a space far smaller than a full stop. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/4/) — Cartoons sometimes show cells as little people with faces and jobs; real cells have no faces or brains, but each kind really does have its own job, like carrying oxygen, sensing light or making a muscle move. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/5/) — Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first saw tiny living things in water, which he called «animalcules», with homemade lenses in the 1670s. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/6/) — In 1665 Robert Hooke looked at a slice of cork, saw little boxes and called them cells, like the small rooms of monks; they were the dead walls of plant cells. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/7/) — Hooke's book Micrographia amazed readers with huge drawings of fleas and lice. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/8/) — Plant cells have a stiff wall, a nucleus and, in green parts, chloroplasts that catch light; iodine stain makes the nucleus show as a dark dot. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/9/) — Animal cells, like the soft roundish cells scraped from your cheek, have a thin skin called a membrane instead of a stiff wall. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/11/) — The yolk of an unfertilised hen's egg is often called a single cell, one of the largest there is, full of food for a growing chick. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/12/) — Nerve cells carry messages fast from one part of the body to another, and some are very long; one runs from the bottom of your spine to your big toe, about a metre, and a giraffe has nerve cells several metres long. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/13/) — Cells make copies of themselves by splitting in two, and your body makes millions of new cells every second. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/14/) — You lose many thousands of skin cells every minute, and much of house dust is dead skin. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/17/) — An amoeba moves by flowing its inside forward into a bulge called a false foot, and it swallows food by flowing around it. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/256-the-microscopic-world-cells-the-building-blocks-of-life/18/) — Electron microscopes use beams of electrons instead of light and show things thousands of times smaller than a light microscope can, such as the spiky shapes of pollen grains. - ← previous: [Plants deeper: poisonous and stinging plants and staying safe](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/255-plants-deeper-poisonous-and-stinging-plants-and-staying-safe/) - next →: [The microscopic world: bacteria, good and bad](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/257-the-microscopic-world-bacteria-good-and-bad/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)