Stand at the kitchen counter with me. On it: an egg, a sprouting potato, a spoon, a jar of yeast, an apple, an ice cube. Some of them are living things. Some are not. And one or two are lying to you.
Broccoli the Brachiosaurus is 25 metres long, eats 200 kg of leaves a day, and has never once been a rock. She will help you decide.
Living things are in a club. To get in, you must pass all four tests — every single day. A stone fails all four. A basil plant passes all four. Let’s look.
Living things get bigger and change shape by themselves. Nobody has to push them.
Living things need food and water. Without them they stop growing, and then they stop altogether.
Yes — even plants. Even the tiny things you can’t see. Living things take in air.
Living things make other living things: eggs, seeds, babies, more yeast. Non-living things can only be copied by a factory.
Drag each specimen — or tap it, then tap a container — into the green pot if it’s alive right now, or the red drawer if it isn’t. Four are alive. Five are not. Broccoli keeps score with her feet.
growing · eating · breathing · making more
never was, or isn’t any more
These are the ones grown-ups get wrong at dinner parties. Each one teaches you something different about what “alive” really means.
Is an egg alive? Yes. Inside a fertilised egg a baby chick is already growing. It takes in air, it uses food from the yolk, and it gets bigger every day — three tests passed before it even owns a beak.
The plain white egg from the fridge is the odd one: no chick is growing in it, so it can’t grow into anything. It came from a living hen, but on its own it’s more like a very fancy lunchbox.
The apple grew on a living tree, so it was part of something alive. But sitting in the fruit bowl it can’t eat, can’t grow, can’t walk anywhere.
The living bit is inside: the seeds. Five tiny apple trees, waiting.
It grows bigger in the freezer! It moves across the worktop as it melts! It even makes a noise!
Still not alive. It never eats, never breathes, and can’t make baby ice cubes by itself. Growing on its own is the test that catches most liars.
Those beige grains are millions of tiny living things — so small you need a microscope, which is unlucky, because they’d make great pets. Feed them sugar and warm water and they burp gas. Those burps are the bubbles in bread, and that’s why dough puffs up like a pillow.
Verdict: alive. Very much alive. Hungry, too.
The yeast was alive in the dough. The hot oven stopped it. Toast can’t grow, eat or burp. Verdict: not alive — it came from living things, and now it’s fuel for one (you).
They aren’t in the kitchen. They aren’t anywhere at all. So how can we be so sure? Because we look for the same four tests in the clues they left behind.
Little dinosaur bones are small and full of holes; grown-up bones are huge and solid. Something only grows like that if it’s alive. Baby T. rex bones are the size of a cat; grown-ups are the size of a bus.
Sharp teeth for meat, flat grinding teeth for leaves — like Broccoli’s pencil-shaped ones. Eating is test number two, and dinosaur jaws passed it loudly.
We’ve found whole nests of dinosaur eggs, some with a curled-up baby inside. And rows of footprints show animals that walked, ran, and turned around — living things doing living things.
Here’s the clever part: a fossil bone was part of a living dinosaur, but the stone it turned into is not alive. The bones in a museum are a living thing’s old shape, kept safe in a non-living skeleton of rock.
Tap each clue to rule on it:
Ask a grown-up to stand at the counter with you and set a timer. Real scientists write things down — so shout them out and let someone tick the boxes.
1. Pick one thing up. 2. Ask the four tests out loud: is it growing? does it eat? does it breathe? can it make more? 3. Decide. 4. If you’re not sure, say “not sure, because…” — that is a brilliant scientific sentence.
Open the fridge too. Look at the back of the veg drawer where something is probably secretly growing.
Awarded for sorting a whole kitchen, catching one ice cube liar, and correctly identifying a jar of yeast as billions of tiny hungry diners.