Trees & the Plant Kingdom Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which carnivorous plant traps small insects on leaves studded with stalked glands, each tipped with a glistening bead of sticky, sugary glue, then slowly folds the leaf and its tentacles around the stuck prey to digest it?

Question 2

What is the name for the partnership, present in the great majority of land plants, between a plant's roots and a soil fungus, in which the fungal threads spread far through the soil gathering water and phosphorus for the plant and receive sugars in return, often linking many plants into one network?

Question 3

What is the name for the dark, dense wood at the centre of an old trunk, no longer carrying water, its cells plugged with resins, gums and tannins that make it hard and resistant to rot, while the paler wood around it does the conducting?

Question 4

What is the name for the facility dug into a frozen mountainside on a Norwegian Arctic island that stores backup copies of crop seed samples from gene banks all over the world, as insurance against war, disaster or simple neglect wiping out the diversity of our food plants?

Question 5

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?

Question 6

What is the name for the concentric bands seen in the cut trunk of a tree from a seasonal climate, each a single year's growth, with pale wide wood formed in spring and darker narrow wood formed later, so that counting them gives the tree's age?

Question 7

Which plant grows as a bushy clump on the branch of a tree, pushing a special root into the branch to steal water and minerals while still making its own food in its evergreen leaves, and is spread by birds that wipe the sticky seeds off their beaks onto the bark?

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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.