Trees & the Plant Kingdom Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which organism is a single male quaking aspen in Utah that has spread by root suckers into some forty-seven thousand genetically identical stems across forty hectares, making it one of the heaviest and perhaps oldest living things, though it is now failing as deer eat the young shoots?

Question 2

What is the name for the process, run in chloroplasts using the green pigment chlorophyll, that combines carbon dioxide and water with the energy of sunlight to build sugars and release oxygen, and that supplies, directly or indirectly, almost all the food and free oxygen on the planet?

Question 3

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 4

Which water plant, rooted in pond mud but holding its round leaves and pink flowers high on stiff stalks above the surface, has leaves so water-repellent that rain rolls off carrying the dirt with it, seeds that have sprouted after more than a thousand years, and the status of national flower of India?

Question 5

Which palm, growing wild on just two islands of the Seychelles, produces the largest and heaviest seed of any plant, weighing up to twenty-five kilograms and taking six or seven years to ripen, its suggestive twin-lobed shape the source of many old sailors' legends?

Question 6

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 7

Which land biome holds by far the most plant species, a broadleaf evergreen forest of the wet, unchanging tropics with a tall layered canopy and, surprisingly, thin poor soil, because almost all the nutrients are locked up in the living plants and are recycled the moment anything falls?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.