Question | Answer |
What is reproduction? | When living things reproduce more of their own kind. |
What is a species? | A group of similar organisms that can mate with each other and produce more of their own kind. |
What is asexual reproduction? | Only one organism is needed to produce a new organism. They can be single or multi-celled. The offspring look identical to the parent (starfish can reproduce in this way). |
What is sexual reproduction? | A male and a female are needed to produce offspring. Offspring have characteristics of both parents (ex.: dogs). |
What are eggs? | Sex cells produced by the female organism. |
What are sperm? | Sex cells produced by the male organism. |
What is a perfect flower? | A flower that has female and male parts. |
What is a pistil? | The complete female part of the flower. It's made up of stigma, style and ovary. |
What is the stigma? | The top part of the pistil, and it is sticky. (sticky stigma can catch pollen) |
What is the style? | Tube like structure that connects the stigma and the ovary. Pollen tube. |
What is the ovary?y | This is the bulging bottom part of the pistil, which contains one or more ovules. Seeds form in here. |
What are ovules? | They are located in the ovary. They contain eggs, which will eventually become seeds. The ovary becomes the fruit. |
What is the staMEN? | The complete male part of the flower (it has MEN in it). It is made up of the anthers and filaments. |
What is the filaMENt? | The stalk-like part of the stamen. |
What is the anther? | A knob-like part. It is the top of the filament. |
What are the sepals? | The leaf-like parts that help to protect the flower when it's in it's bud (PALS protect each other!). |
What is a gamete? | The name for sex cells. |
What is fertilization? | When the nucleus of a sperm links with the nucleus of an egg. |
What is pollen? | The powdery substance made by the anther. It is made up of many grains, and they are the sperm cell of the plant. |
What are petals? | The brightly colored part of the flower that attracts birds and insects. |
What is pollination? | The transfer of pollen from a male part of a flower to a female part of a flower. There are two types of pollination: cross and self. |
What is self-pollination? | Occurs in a perfect flower. The pollen from the male part falls on the female part within the same flower. |
What is cross-pollination? | Often occurs with different flowers. Pollen from one flower is carried to the pistil of a different plant. Can be transferred by wind, insects or birds. |
What is germination? | The sprouting of a new plant from a seed. |
What are the first three of five steps of flower fertilization? | 1. Pollen grain grows pollen tube toward ovary. 2. Sperm cells travel through pollen tube to ovary. May be many pollen tubes. 3. Pollen tube reaches ovary; sperm cell joins with egg cell. Egg is fertilized! |
What are the two final steps of fertilization? | 4. Inside ovule, fertilized egg divides many times. After multiple divisions, the seed forms. 5. Seeds form and ovary gets larger--can change into a fruit, pod or hard shell which protects seed. |
What is an embryo? | This is the name of a baby plant. Will grow into a new plant someday. |
What is the endosperm? | The stored food for the embryo. |
What is dormant? | It means something is inactive, or resting. A seed can remain dormant for a long time. |
Who was Gregor Mendel? | He was the father of genetics, pollinating pea plants to study inheritance. |
Who was Walter Flemming? | He discovered chromosomes, rod like structures in cells that duplicate themselves when the cells divide after fertilization. Chromosomes enable a cell to make an exact replica of itself. |
What is genetics? | The study of heredity. |
What is heredity? | The passing of traits from parent to offspring? |
What is a trait? | A characteristic that an organism can pass on to its offspring through its genes. Ex.: hair color. |
What are genes? | A unit of chromosome that carries information determining the traits of an organism. |
What is purebred? | An organism that produces offspring with the same form of trait as the parent. Ex.: purebred short pea plants always produce short offspring. |
What is hybrid? | Offspring from parents having unlike forms of a trait. No organism has all dominant or all recessive genes. |
What is a generation? | All offspring produced by a set of parents. |
What are alleles? | Different forms of a gene? |
What is a dominant allele? | An allele whose trait always shows up in an organism when the allele is present. This allele has the most influence. Represented (in a Punnett Square) by capital letters. |
What is a recessive allele? | An allele that has the least influence. It is covered up or masked whenever the dominant allele is present. Represented by lower case letters in a Punnett Square. |
What is a pure line? | An organism whose genes for a certain trait are the same from both parents. This can be two dominant or two recessive genes. |