MP State Exams English MP SI Solved Papers MP-SI 29 October 2017, 2 PM

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    Read the passage carefully and answer the question givens below: You might not think of plants as particularly chatty but in reality, they communicate surprisingly well with each other, especially when faced with danger. According to a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science injured plants send out emergency signals to alert neighbours to start building up their defenses. The chain of events that led to this surprising discovery began about two years ago, after University of Delaware Botainst. Harsh Bais agreed to mentor 16-year-old Connor Sweeney on a research project. The ecstatic high school student got to work right away, spending all his free time, including weekends and summer breaks, in Bais's lab at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. His project entailed culturing Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mustard weed, for use in experiments. The young researcher would place the seeds in Petri dishes and test tubes filled with agar to promote growth. The seeds would germinate about six days later and transform into delicate three-inch saplings with bright green leaves. One day, Sweeney sliced a mustard weed leaf in two spots mimicking an insect bite to see how it would begin the repair process. The following day, the young researcher was surprised to find that while the injured plant remained unchanged, the roots of the neighbouring young mustard weed sapling had grown considerably longer and even had lateral offshoots. "It was crazy—I didn't believe it at first. I would have expected the injured plant to put more resources into growing roots. But we didn't see that." said Bais, who conducted a similar study in 2012, where he found that soil bacteria living near the roots of a plant helped boost its immunity by signaling the leaf pores, or stomata, to close in the presence of pathogens. To ensure that it was not the same system at work, Sweeney partitioned the plants to prevent any communication between their root bacteria and repeated the experiment multiple times. The results were the same!
    When do injured plants communicate?

    A) When faced with danger

    B) When they begin their repair process

    C) When they spot soil and water

    D) All of the above

    Correct Answer: A


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