Living organisms move around and grow (though plants and mushrooms don't appear always to move). The living usually adapt to different conditions and they evolve so that there particular species can continue to thrive in the world, but even then it takes a while and it is not always soon enough for them to survive. They all have ways of collecting food and reproducing their own. All of them live in an area that they can live and find food in comfortably, because of course they 'know' they can't survive in places where the conditions are not right. They will only survive in certain conditions, orange trees don't exactly grown in Maine, and Pandas don't live in Antarctica.
Non-living things don't really need a certain habitat because they are things that make up some of the conditions in the habitat in the first place, they include things like the climate; hot and cold, rainy and snowy, temperatures and the wind. They don't need food they only need things like the sun and the clouds, they need mountains and streams, they need the moon and the oceans. They need living organisms to regulate them in some cases and in others they need non-living things. They are technically able to exist anywhere because they don't need food and they don't need to reproduce because they are just created by things coming together. They are what makes up the environment they include water, mountains, clouds, and even the sun and the moon, and all man-made objects are non-living.
The characteristics that make the difference between living and non-living things is that living things have systems that let them live by themselves. They also have things that let them survive, like ways of moving if needed an specific ways of feeding themselves. Non-living things don't have any of these things even though some man-made things seem to act like they are doing these things.
Even though the non-living and living organisms are composed of atoms they are constructed much differently and they atoms are included in different substances or elements. Living organisms have systems that make them survive by themselves while non-living things cannot and do not need to survive because they don't have a need to live. Things like chairs, desks, lamps, and computers are use only as tools for living things. And things like wind, temperature, and water are just things that are required for the living of living organisms. Most, if not all, non-living things have a purpose that helps out the living creatures.
