Questions about Plant
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is a plant in the kingdom Plantae?
Plants are eukaryotic organisms that make up the kingdom Plantae and are predominantly photosynthetic, obtaining energy from sunlight using chlorophyll in their chloroplasts to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water. By the definition used here, plants form the clade Viridiplantae, the green algae together with land plants such as hornworts, liverworts, mosses, lycophytes, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. Most plants are multicellular, except for some green algae.
How many species of plants are there?
There are about 382,000 accepted species of plants, of which some 283,000 produce seeds. About 85 to 90% of all plant species are flowering plants, which number around 258,650 living species.
When did the first land plants appear?
The first land plants appeared in the Ordovician, with a level of organization like that of bryophytes. Primitive land plants began to diversify in the late Silurian, and by the end of the Devonian most basic features of modern plants, including roots, leaves, and secondary wood, were present in trees such as Archaeopteris.
How do plants reproduce?
Plants reproduce sexually using gametes or asexually through ordinary growth, and many use both. Sexual reproduction involves alternation of generations between a diploid sporophyte and a haploid gametophyte, while asexual reproduction uses structures like runners, tubers, bulbs, cuttings, and gemmae that can each grow into a new plant.
Why are plants important to humans?
Plants are the core of agriculture and the basis of human food, with about 7,000 species used for food though most of today's diet comes from only 30 species. They also supply medicines such as aspirin, morphine, quinine, and taxol, along with nonfood products including rubber, dyes, paper, and cloth made from cotton and other plant fibers.
What makes plant cells different from animal cells?
Plant cells have a large water-filled central vacuole, chloroplasts, and a strong flexible cell wall made mostly of cellulose that sits outside the cell membrane. The cell wall lets plant cells swell with water without bursting, and chloroplasts derive from an ancient symbiosis with photosynthetic cyanobacteria.