The Plant Kingdom

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The Plant Kingdom: Plants are multicellular organisms. The main difference between them and other organisms is they feed using photosynthesis, which is a process which involves making sugars out of water and carbon dioxide using the sunlight energy. Plants are green because they contain a lot of chlorophyll which is a green pigment which traps sunlight for photosynthesis, plants are autotrophic organisms, they make their own food. Plant cells contain a large vacuole, a nucleus, chloroplasts and a cell wall made of cellulose, cell walls are not present in animal cells. The Plants Kingdom contains several different phyla, but we will discuss only one of them, which is flowering plants or Angiosperms. There are two types of flowering plants, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous (monocots and dicots for short). The main difference between both types is the number of cotyledons in their seeds, monocots contain only one cotyledons in their seeds while dicots contain two in theirs. Cotyledons are structures which grow into the first leaves after germination. One could differentiate between the two classes (monocots and dicots) just by looking at their external features. Monocots have flowers with number of parts divisible by three (three petals – six leaves etc.), while dicots have number of parts of the flower divisible by 4 or 5 (4 petals – 10 leaves etc.) | | A,monocot flower containing 6petals (divisible by 3) | A dicot flower containing 5 petals (divisible by 5) | The difference could also be told by looking at the leaves of both flowers, you find that monocots have long sharp leaves with parallel veins, and dicots have leaves with branching veins.
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