Help students understand ecosystems and food chains with this Grade 9 science worksheet.
Students will complete fill-in-the-blank questions covering producers, consumers, decomposers, and energy flow.
Ecosystems and Food Chains — Practice
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Try these before or after you print the worksheet. The printable asks you to fill in the words. This asks which way the energy flows and who eats whom — a chain is about direction, and a word bank cannot test direction.
Question 1 — put them in order
Click these in order, following the energy through a food chain.
Sun → producer → consumer → consumer. Every food chain starts with the sun, because only producers can turn sunlight into food.
Question 2
What is a producer?
Makes its own food. Plants are the usual example, and they sit at the start of almost every food chain.
Question 3
What do decomposers do?
Break things down and return the nutrients. Without them, the nutrients locked in dead material would never come back into the ecosystem.
Question 4
An ecosystem includes non-living things as well. Which of these is one?
Water — along with soil, air, sunlight and temperature. An ecosystem is the living things and their surroundings.
Question 5
Why does a food chain start with the sun?
Energy has to enter the living world somewhere, and photosynthesis is the door. Everything further along the chain is passing on energy that came from sunlight.
Question 6 — select all that apply
Select every consumer, then press Check.
Rabbit, fox and caterpillar all eat something else. Grass, an oak tree and algae make their own food, which makes them producers.
Think about it
Energy flows one way through a food chain, but nutrients get recycled. Which organisms do the recycling?
What would happen to a food chain if all the producers disappeared?
Are you a consumer? What do you eat that is a producer?
Why are there usually far more producers than top consumers in an ecosystem?