PLANTS
Read the Passage given below:
1. Plants have it tough: they’re on the menu of nearly every living creature—from leaf mining grubs to voracious goats to broccoli-chomping vegans. To survive, they have no choice but to stand and fight. Tactical retreat is not an option. They are now involved in an ever-escalating arms race with their enemies.
2. The most visible weapons in their armoury are thorns, spikes and stinging hair. Every rose grows between vicious thorns. Cacti make legendary pincushions. Grass has silica-serrated edges that can draw blood. Acacias are fearsomely armed. (I got caught in a thorn-bush once, and it took 20 minutes of struggle and half a pint of blood to free myself.) It’s not really about pinpricks, it’s about chemical and biological. warfare; about poisons that can make you sneeze, itch, convulse and writhe in pain; ones that can devilishly re-program life-cycles. Ah, yes and there’s cyanide poisoning too!
3. No visitor to the hills would have been spared the attention of the `bichchubooti, that notorious stinging nettle whose hair-like hypodermic barbs cause horrible inflammation. (They say a plant belonging to the spinach family usually grows next to it and is an antidote, but I’ve never checked.)
4. Have you watched a bug gets caught in pine resin? It’s the sticky ending to end all sticky endings and the beginnings of a fossil a million years down the line. The latex of rubber plants turns sticky on contact with air and gums up the mouthparts of insects: the ultimate anti-chewing-gum weapon if you like. The infamous “milkweed” family of plants produces “milk” so poisonous it can give cows a heart attack. Some plants give off hydrogen cyanide when bitten — the rest, as they say, is history. Others release bitter which jam up digestion.
5. But some plants are even more diabolical—they’re into biological warfare which can turn their enemies into time-warp freaks. Some contain large amounts of the juvenile (larval) hormones of predator insects, which cause these to remain frozen in the larval stage and die without reproducing. Others contain hormones, which fast-forward the development of the insect skipping out important larval stages and causing them to become adults too quickly.
Choose the correct alternatives from the options given below:
(a) The fact that plants can devilishly re-program life-cycles is an example of
(i) biological warfare (ii) chemical warfare
(iii) physical warfare (iv) none of the above
(b) Plants stand and fight by
(i) having spikes/thorns and stinging hair
(ii) poisoning people who eat them
(iii) making people sneeze/itch/convulse/writhe in pain
(iv) all of the above
Answer the following questions briefly in your own words :
(c) Why does a plant need to have a defence mechanism?
(d) Mention any two examples of chemical warfare used by a plant.
(e) Why does the writer expect a visitor to the hills to have an encounter with the bichchobooti plant?
(f) What was the writer’s experience with the acacia plant?
(g) What does the writer mean by the phrase ‘beginning of a fossil a million years down the line’?
(h) What does the phrase `time-warp’ freaks refer to?
Find words from the passage which mean the same as each of the following:
(i) insatiable (para 1)
(j) notorious (para 4)
ANSWERS:-
(a) (i) and (ii) are both correct according to the passage.
(b) (iv)
(c) Plants are a source of food for a range of life forms, from animals to humans. Plants cannot move from one place to another. Thus to survive, they must have a defence mechanism in place.
(d) Plants can produce poisons that can make one sneeze, itch, convulse and writhe in pain. Plants can also produce poisons like cyanide. These are two examples of chemical warfare used by plants.
(e) The ‘bichchubooti‘ plant is found in abundance in hilly regions of the country and is famous for its inflammation causing barbs. Perhaps this is why the writer expects people who visit hills to have an encounter with this plant.
(f) The writer once got caught in an acacia thorn bush. After struggling for twenty minutes and losing half a pint of blood in the process was the writer able to free himself.
(g) I cannot make sense of this line in the passage enough to answer this.
(h) Some plants can alter the growth cycle of insects. They can contain larval hormones of predator insects that cause insect larvae to remain frozen. In other cases, plants can contain hormones that cause these larvae to grow into adult insects too quickly. Hence, they become ‘time-warp freaks’.
(i) Voracious.
(j) Infamous.
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