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Quiz: The Amazing Plants Around Us

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Sometimes it almost seems like the number of plants and variations in plantlife are there to astound and confound us. Plants are found nearly everywhere in the world, from the mountain tops to the valleys, from the oceans to the deserts, from the tropics to the Arctic and Antarctic, from the middle of cities to the countryside and wilderness. We know enough about plants to fill many volumes of an expansive encyclopedia, and yet what we know pales in comparison to what we don’t know.

This quiz is much more general than some of the other plant quizzes might be. The purpose of the quiz is to learn while having a lot of fun. It might even encourage people to spend a little more time learning about plants or growing them.

  • Question of

    True or False: Bamboo, sugar cane, corn, and rice are all kinds of grass.

    • True
    • False
  • Question of

    The reason people ‘cry’ when cutting onions is that cutting the onion cells release sulfur compounds that turn into weak sulfuric acid when combined with the moisture in our eyes. True or False

    • True
    • False
  • Question of

    A strawberry fruit is the only fruit in the world that has its seeds on the outside of the fruit. On average, how many seeds does a typical strawberry fruit have?

    • 50
    • 200
    • 1,000
  • Question of

    Of all the known known species of plants in the world, what percentage is found in the oceans?

    • About 25%
    • About 40%
    • About 85%
  • Question of

    The name ‘banana’ is Arabic. What does banana mean?

    • Yellow
    • Fingers
    • Long tropical fruit
  • Question of

    Vanilla beans, from which we get vanilla flavoring, comes from a kind of…

    • legume
    • grass
    • orchid
  • Question of

    What kind of tree is struck by lightning more often than any other kind of tree?

    • oak
    • pine
    • fir
  • Question of

    The largest flower in the world is Amorphophallus titanium or Titan Arum. The blossom grows to over seven feet tall and four feet wide. These flowers smell a lot like…

    • roses
    • onions
    • rotting meat
  • Question of

    During the summer, trees draw water up to the leaves and the water then evaporates. Several tons of water can evaporate from a large oak tree each day. This process is called…

    • transpiration
    • respiration
    • capillary evaporation
    • perspiration
  • Question of

    The balsa tree, Ochroma pyramidale, has very light but strong wood. This tree is found in South America and despite the light-weight wood, it is actually a kind of hardwood tree. Most surprisingly, it belongs to what family?

    • Willow
    • Rose
    • Mallow

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Written by Rex Trulove

35 Comments

    • That is a very good score! In regard to 6, one thing that makes it confusing is the use of the word ‘bean’ in “vanilla bean”. They aren’t beans at all. They are seed pods.

      As for oaks, I don’t think that they’ve conclusively figured out why, but on average oaks get struck almost twice as often as any other kind of tree. It could be because of the tree, but it could also be because so many strikes occur in areas where oaks grow.

      I think of ‘transpire’ because ‘trans’ means to move. The trees move water from the roots to the leaves and into the atmosphere. If it wasn’t for transpiration, no tree could grow much more than 30 feet tall. That is the limit of how far water can move up a tube under the force of gravity, pushing the water up. That puzzled botanists for a long time. Redwoods often grow to over 300 feet tall and scientists didn’t know why, for a very long time. Perhaps I’ll write about it.

      1

      • Thats what got me, I thought vanilla bean. So you could plant a vanilla bean? I need to read up on that for sure. I was thinking that maybe the oaks had more water in them, but they also cover more of radius than a pine.
        The redwoods get water from the fog too!

        1

        • A vanilla bean can be planted and grown, though they are quite picky plants for growing conditions. That is a good point regarding the radius of oaks. Pines tend to be taller but oaks have a much wider drip radius. Yes, redwoods can use water from the air. A number of tropical plants do, too. Interestingly, redwood seeds require forest fires in order to grow. Otherwise, the shell is too thick and they can’t germinate.

          1

          • It makes sense, too. The outer bark of redwoods is extremely thick. Forest fires don’t usually do much damage to redwoods. However, it does clear underbrush, which would give a seedling a much better chance to grow. If the seeds germinated as easily as with pines and firs, most of the seedlings would never survive.

    • That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Did you learn anything from the quiz and would your score be better if you took the quiz again? If you said yes, that isn’t a bad score because you now know more than you did.