GMAS Biology Practice Test

Biomes are large land areas defined mainly by climate and the characteristic communities of plants and animals they support. The climate—patterns of temperature and precipitation—shapes the dominant vegetation, and that vegetation, in turn, determines the animal life that can thrive there, creating distinct, recognizable regions such as deserts, tropical forests, temperate forests, grasslands, and tundra that can span multiple continents. An ecosystem focuses on the interactions within a specific place, from a pond to a forest, and can exist within a biome; a habitat is the immediate environment where an individual organism lives. A region is a general geographic area and isn’t a precise biological term. So the term that best describes these large terrestrial regions with distinct climate and characteristic species is biomes.