“Tree hugger.” “Tree hugger.” “Carl Sagan.”

A “Jeopardy!” contestant’s defense of his eyebrow-raising “slang term for environmentalist” won him a second chance on the TV quiz show.

Vincent Valenzuela, 43, of Wheaton, Ill., lost the Final Jeopardy round on the show that aired Friday.

The prompt, as read by host Alex Trebek: “This slang term for an environmentalist is literally true of groups that used passive resistance vs. deforestation, as in India in 1973.”

Two contestants correctly wrote: “What is a tree hugger?” Valenzuela initially wrote that, too — then crossed it out and replaced it with: “Who is Carl Sagan?”

Valenzuela challenged his elimination by pointing out that the sentence as displayed on the screen was missing the initial T, so it began: “His slang term for an environmentalist …”

As he explained to the Chicago Tribune: “It sounds like they’re looking for a person’s name, and so I just grabbed a person who was big in the environment and who would have been a contemporary in the ’70s.”

The show’s producers bought his explanation, and he has been invited back to try again.

The missing “T” was not Valenzuela’s only problem of the show: He was bleeped when he blurted out a swear word after blanking on an answer.

Another ousted “Jeopardy!” contestant is getting a second try this week: Four-time winner Ryan Fenster, whose initial shows aired five months ago, returned after the judges determined that “the Great Schism” could indeed apply to the Western Schism of 1378. He won Tuesday’s game, the first of his return.