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What is living?
Concepts tested here
- Defining features of life
All Questions
2011 AIPMT-MAINS 1 question
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Which one of the following aspects is an exclusive characteristic of living things?The most obvious and technically complicated feature of all living organisms is the ability to sense their surroundings and respond to environmental stimuli; this is consciousness, a defining property of living organisms.
Perception of events in the environment and their memory is therefore exclusive to living things.
Increase in mass by accumulation of material on the surface is seen in non-living objects too (mountains, boulders, sand mounds), so growth by itself is not a defining property.
Isolated metabolic reactions carried out in vitro (in a test tube) are neither living nor non-living things; they are living reactions only.
Hence the exclusive characteristic of living things is the perception of events happening in the environment and their memory.