Collective nouns

You might not know it, but you encounter collective nouns in everyday
speech. Collective nouns are words for single things that are made up of more than
one person, animal, place, thing, or idea. You cant have a team without individual
members; even so, we discuss a team as a single entity. Collective noun is a word
which refers to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in
everyday speech are mundane and are not specific to one specific kind, such as the
word "group," which may apply to "people" in the phrase "a group of people" but may
also correctly refer to "dogs," in the phrase "a group of dogs." Other collective nouns
are specific to one kind, especially terms of venery, which are words for specific
groups of animals. For example, "pride" as a term of venery always refers to lions,
never to dogs and cows.Herd is a singular collective noun. Follows is a singular
verb, and the word its is a singular pronoun. All the animals in the herd arrive at
the watering hole at the same time. Today, Ms. Kennedy's class takes its SOL test.

Examples of collective nouns

1. A class of students.
2. An army of soldiers.
3. A choir of singers.
4. A crew of sailors.
5. A band of musicians.
6. A bunch of crooks.
7. A crowd of people/spectators.
8. A gang of thieves.
9. A group of dancers.
1. A team of players.

2. An army of ants.
3. A flight of birds.
4. A flock of birds.
5. A haul of fish.
6. A flock of sheep.
7. A herd of deer/cattle/elephants/goats/buffaloes.
8. A hive of bees.
9. A litter of cubs.
10. A host of sparrows.
11. A team of horses.
12. A troop of lions.
13. A zoo of wild animals.
14. A pack of wolves.
15. A litter of puppies/kittens.
16. A swarm of bees/ants/rats/flies.
17. A team of horses/ducks/oxen.
18. A murder of crows.
19. A kennel of dogs.
20. A pack of hounds.
1. A group of islands.
2. A galaxy of stars.

3. A wad of notes.
4. A forest of trees.
5. A stack of wood.
6. A fleet of ships.
7. A string of pearls.
8. An album of stamps/autographs/photographs.
9. A hedge of bushes.
10. A library of books.
11. A basket of fruit.
12. A bowl of rice.
13. A pack of cards.
14. A pair of shoes.
15. A bouquet of flowers.
16. A bunch of keys.
17. A chest of drawers.
18. A pack of lies.
19. A range of mountains.
20. A cloud of dust
21.A catch of fish
A collective noun is a term we use to call groups so that we can refer to them as a single
unit. For example, pack or gang are collective nouns. However, certain grouping are
given some more interesting and often amusing names. Below are some example of a
collective noun:

 A herd of cattle
A troupe of dancers
These collective nouns are not derived from any formal rules. Instead, they have
developed over hundreds of years from terms that have captured peoples imagination,
with the most successful terms being added to everyday language.
Many of the collective nouns center on groupings of people, such as profession or family
roles. For example:
A team of a athletes
A staff of employees
A cruft of hackers
For more examples, see the list of common nouns for people.
Groups of animals are another popular subject for collective nouns. Some examples are
given below:
A sloth of beavers
A business of ferrets
A crash of rhinoceroses
See more examples of animals collective nouns .
Collective nouns can also apply to objects and other things. For example:

A bunch of bananas
A network of computers

A hailstorm of gunships

galaxy
Galaxies are sprawling space systems composed of dust, gas, and countless stars. The
number of galaxies cannot be countedthe observable universe alone may contain 100
billion. Some of these distant systems are similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, while
others are quite different.

Galaxies with less than a billion stars are considered "small galaxies." In our own galaxy,
the sun is just one of about 100 billion stars.

Galaxies are classified into three main types: spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and
irregular galaxies.

Spiral galaxies, such as the Milky Way, consist of a flat disk with a bulging center and
surrounding spiral arms. The galaxy's disk includes stars, planets, dust, and gasall of
which rotate around the galactic center in a regular manner.

This spinning motion, at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, may cause matter
in the disk to take on a distinctive spiral shape like a cosmic pinwheel. Some spiral
galaxies obtain even more interesting shapes that earn them descriptive names, such as
sombrero galaxies.

Older stars reside in the bulge at the center of the galactic disk. Many new stars also form
in spiral systems, and their disks are surrounded by a halo, which scientists believe is rich
with mysterious dark matter.

Elliptical galaxies are shaped as their name suggests. They are generally round but
stretch longer along one axis than along the other. They may be nearly circular or so
elongated that they take on a cigarlike appearance.

Elliptical galaxies contain many older stars, up to one trillion, but little dust and other
interstellar matter. Their stars orbit the galactic center, like those in the disks of spiral
galaxies, but they do so in more random directions. Few new stars are known to form in
elliptical galaxies.

The universe's largest known galaxies are giant elliptical galaxies, which may be as much
as two million light-years long. Elliptical galaxies may also be small, in which case they
are dubbed dwarf elliptical galaxies.

Galaxies that are not spiral or elliptical are called irregular galaxies. Irregular galaxies
appear misshapen and lack a distinct form, often because they are within the gravitational
influence of other galaxies close by.

Galactic Mergers

Some galaxies occur alone or in pairs, but they are more often parts of larger associations
known as groups, clusters, and superclusters.

Galaxies in such groups often interact and even merge together in a dynamic cosmic
dance of interacting gravity. Mergers cause gases to flow towards the galactic center,
which can trigger phenomena like rapid star formation.

Our own Milky Way may someday merge with the Andromeda galaxyjust two million
light-years away and visible to the naked eye from Earth's Northern Hemisphere.

These intergalactic processes may be part of natural evolution by which irregular galaxies
transform into one of the other shapes, and by which spiral galaxies eventually become
elliptical galaxiesas scientists believe they must.

Galaxy Origins

Most astronomers suggest that galaxies formed shortly after a cosmic "big bang"that
began the universe some 10 billion to 20 billion years ago. In the milliseconds following
this explosion, clouds of gases began to coalesce, collapse, and compress under gravity to
form the building blocks of galaxies.

Scientists are divided on just how galaxies first formed. Some believe that smaller
clusters of about one million stars, known as globular clusters, formed first and later
gathered into galaxies. Others believe that galaxies formed first and that only later did the
stars within them begin to gather into smaller clusters.

This is a general list of galaxies, for more specific lists, see lists of galaxies

Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for
completeness. You can help by expanding itwith reliably sourced entries.

The following is a list of notable galaxies.

There are about 50 galaxies in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete
list), on the order of 100,000 in ourLocal Supercluster and an estimated number of about 100
to 200 billion in all of the observable universe.

The discovery of the nature of galaxies as distinct from other nebulae (interstellar clouds)
was made in the 1920s. The first attempts at systematic catalogues of galaxies were made in
the 1960s the Catalogue of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies listing 29,418 galaxies and
galaxy clusters, and with the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies, a putatively complete list
of galaxieswith photographic magnitude above 15 comprising 30,642 items. In the 1980s,
the Lyons Groups of Galaxies listed 485 galaxy groups with 3,933 member galaxies. Galaxy
Zoo is a project aiming at a more comprehensive list: launched in July 2007, it has classified
over one million galaxy images from The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, The Hubble Space
Telescope and the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey.

A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust,
and dark matter.[1][2] The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias (), literally
"milky", a reference to the Milky Way. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few
billion (109) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars,[3] each orbiting its
galaxy'scenter of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology

as elliptical,[4] spiral and irregular.[5] Many galaxies are thought to have black holes at
their active centers. The Milky Way's central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a mass
four million times greater than the Sun.[6] As of March 2016, GN-z11 is the oldest and most
distant observed galaxy with a comoving distance of 32 billion light-years from Earth, and
observed as it existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Previously, as of July
2015, EGSY8p7 was the most distant known galaxy, estimated to have a light travel distance
of 13.2 billion light-years away.[7][8][9][10]

Approximately 170 billion (1.7 1011) to 200 billion (2.0 1011) galaxies exist in
the observable universe.[11] Most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter
and usually separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).
The space between galaxies is filled with a tenuous gas having an average density of less
than oneatom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are gravitationally organized into
associations known as galaxy groups,clusters, and superclusters. At the largest scale, these
associations are generally arranged into sheets and filamentssurrounded by immense voids

The main systems of the human body are as follows:

Clockwise from top left: the integumentary

skeletal
nervous
cardiovascular
endocrine and muscular systems.

Clockwise from top left: the lymphatic

respiratory
urinary
reproductive (female
male) and digestive systems.
1. Cardiovascular / Circulatory system:
1. Circulates blood around the body via the heart, arteries and veins,
delivering oxygen and nutrients to organs and cells and carrying their
waste products away.
2. Digestive system / Excretory system:

1. Mechanical and chemical processes that provide nutrients via

the mouth, esophagus, stomach and intestines.
2. Eliminates waste from the body.
3. Endocrine system:
1. Provides chemical communications within the body using hormones.
4. Integumentary system/ Exocrine system:
1. Skin, hair, nails, sweat and other exocrine glands.
5. Lymphatic system / Immune system:
1. The system comprising a network of lymphatic vessels that carry a clear
fluid called lymph.
2. Defends the body against disease-causing agents.
6. Muscular system/Skeletal system:
1. Enables the body to move using muscles.
2. Bones supporting the body and its organs.
7. Nervous system:
1. Collects and processes information from the senses via nerves and
the brain and tells the muscles to contract to cause physical actions.
8. Renal system / Urinary system:
1. The system where the kidneys filter blood.
9. Reproductive system:
1. The sex organs required for the production of offspring.
10. Respiratory system:

1. The lungs and the trachea that bring air into the body.

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of

their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system. [2] These biotic
and abiotic components are regarded as linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows.
[3]

As ecosystems are defined by the network of interactions among organisms, and between

organisms and their environment,[4] they can be of any size but usually encompass specific, limited
spaces[5] (although some scientists say that the entire planet is an ecosystem). [6]
Energy, water, nitrogen and soil minerals are other essential abiotic components of an ecosystem.
The energy that flows through ecosystems is obtained primarily from the sun. It generally enters the
system through photosynthesis, a process that also capturescarbon from the atmosphere. By
feeding on plants and on one another, animals play an important role in the movement of matter and

energy through the system. They also influence the quantity of plant and microbial biomass present.
By breaking down dead organic matter, decomposers release carbon back to the atmosphere and
facilitate nutrient cycling by converting nutrients stored in dead biomass back to a form that can be
readily used by plants and other microbes.[7]
Ecosystems are controlled both by external and internal factors. External factors such as climate,
the parent material that forms the soil, and topography control the overall structure of an ecosystem
and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem. [8] Other
external factors include time and potential biota. Ecosystems are dynamic entitiesinvariably, they
are subject to periodic disturbances and are in the process of recovering from some past
disturbance.[9] Ecosystems in similar environments that are located in different parts of the world can
have very different characteristics simply because they contain different species. [8] Theintroduction of
non-native species can cause substantial shifts in ecosystem function. Internal factors not only
control ecosystem processes but are also controlled by them and are often subject to feedback
loops.[8] While the resource inputs are generally controlled by external processes like climate and
parent material, the availability of these resources within the ecosystem is controlled by internal
factors like decomposition, root competition or shading.[8] Other internal factors include disturbance,
succession and the types of species present. Although humans exist and operate within ecosystems,
their cumulative effects are large enough to influence external factors like climate. [8]
Biodiversity affects ecosystem function, as do the processes of disturbance and succession.
Ecosystems provide a variety of goods and services upon which people depend; the principles
of ecosystem management suggest that rather than managing individual species,natural
resources should be managed at the level of the ecosystem itself. Classifying ecosystems into
ecologically homogeneous units is an important step towards effective ecosystem management, but
there is no single, agreed-upon way to do this.

Army

Audience

Band

Board

Cast

Class

Committee

Company

Crowd

Family

Faculty

Group

Jury

Navy

Puble

Plethora

School

Society

Staf

Team

Troupe

Brood of chickens

Colony of rabbits

Drove of cattle

Flock of birds

Gaggle of geese

Herd of bufalo

Litter of kittens

Nest of bees

Pride of lions

Swarm of hornets

Bed of oysters

Team of horses