Trees & the Plant Kingdom Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which plant, the sole survivor of a group that formed great forests in the coal age, has jointed, hollow, ribbed green stems that feel gritty because they are stiffened with silica, rings of tiny scale-leaves at each joint, and spores borne in a cone at the tip?

Question 2

Which of the two main branches of the flowering plants has a single seed leaf, leaves with parallel veins, flower parts in threes, and water pipes scattered through the stem rather than in a ring, so that most of its members cannot form true wood?

Question 3

Which large hardwood tree of the monsoon forests of South and Southeast Asia yields a golden-brown timber so full of natural oils and silica that it resists water, rot, warping and termites for decades, making it the classic wood for ship decks, garden furniture and temple carving?

Question 4

What is the name for the plant hormone, unusual in being a gas, that ripens fruit and spreads ripening from one fruit to its neighbours, and that also triggers leaves and petals to drop and is given off by a plant that is wounded or stressed?

Question 5

What is the name for the green, disc-shaped compartment inside a leaf cell, descended from a bacterium that was swallowed and kept more than a billion years ago, still carrying its own loop of DNA, in which photosynthesis takes place on stacks of internal membranes?

Question 6

What is the name for the dry, one-seeded fruit with a stiff papery blade that sets it spinning like a helicopter rotor as it drops, slowing its descent so the wind can carry it clear of the parent tree?

Question 7

What is the name for the flowering plants, the group that makes up the great majority of land plant species, is defined by having true flowers and by enclosing its seeds inside a fruit, and provides almost all of humanity's food?

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About Trees & the Plant Kingdom

This quiz is about the plant kingdom: the mosses, ferns and their relatives, the conifers and other cone-bearers, and the flowering plants, along with how a plant is built and runs itself, how flowers, seeds and fruit work, the record-breaking and remarkable plants, the great plant families and crops, and the biomes and conservation. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a group, a process, a body part, a flower or seed part, a record plant or a family and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Fungi, lichens and algae are kept for the Fungi & Microbes quiz. It is a knowledge quiz, not the picture quiz called Identify the Flower.

The first pack is the plant kingdom itself: photosynthesis and chlorophyll, the mosses and the ferns, the naked-seeded conifers, cycads and ginkgo, the flowering plants and their split into single-seed-leaf and two-seed-leaf branches, alternation of generations, the seed and the spore and the fruit, the newly found Wollemi and dawn redwood conifers, the horsetails and clubmosses of the coal age, and the water pipes that let plants grow tall.

The second pack is how a plant works: roots, leaf pores, the water pull from the leaves, the sugar-carrying tissue, the layer that thickens a trunk, growth rings, heartwood, the growing points, the waxy skin, the chloroplast and the big water-filled sac, the cell wall and lignin, bending toward light and up against gravity, the growth hormone, the ripening gas, the drought hormone, the heat-beating form of photosynthesis, and nitrogen from the air.

The third pack is flowers, pollination, seeds and fruit: the parts of a flower, pollen and double fertilisation, wind pollination, the ultraviolet runway marks, buzz pollination, the flower-and-moth fit that Darwin predicted, the dandelion parachute and the spinning winged fruit, the world's largest seed, seeds flung by force or planted by ants, the cold and the night-length that trigger flowering, the flower cluster, the daisy and orchid families, and the rejection of a plant's own pollen.

The fourth pack is trees and extraordinary plants: the tallest, bulkiest and oldest trees, the aspen that is one giant clone, the water-storing baobab, the pillar-rooted banyan and the sacred fig, the air-breathing mangrove, the giant Seychelles palm nut, the reeking titan arum and the stemless Rafflesia, the Venus flytrap, pitcher plant and sundew, the strangler fig and mistletoe, the plant that revives from dust, the two-leaved welwitschia, and the record-fast bamboo.

The fifth pack is useful plants, families, biomes and conservation: the grass, pea, nightshade and rose families, cotton and rubber, the cloned Cavendish banana, the potato and the Irish blight, the Chipko tree-hugging movement, the self-cleaning lotus, neem, sandalwood and teak, the Svalbard seed vault, the Green Revolution's dwarf wheat, the root-and-fungus partnership, the pressed-plant herbarium, the rainforest and the boreal forest, and deforestation.

The wrong answers are always other plants, groups or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of tree rings, bark, a leaf, moss or a forest canopy, chosen because it names no species and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.