What Is a Life Cycle?

Every living thing goes through the same big journey. It starts (it is born or it hatches or it sprouts), it grows, it reproduces (it makes young of its own kind), and finally it dies.

A life cycle is the ordered set of stages a living thing passes through, from the start of its life to the point where it produces the next generation. We call it a cycle because the young then begin the very same stages — the pattern repeats, round and round, generation after generation.

Worked example — a chicken. An egg hatches into a chick. The chick grows into a hen. The hen lays eggs. Those eggs hatch into new chicks. The journey has arrived back where it began, so it is a cycle, not a straight line.