Reproduction in Plants and Animals — Asexual Modes, Flower Parts, Pollination and Fertilisation

Reproduction is the last big chapter of school biology that behaves like a list rather than a theory. Almost nothing in it needs deriving. Almost everything in it is a pair.

Organism to mode: Amoeba to binary fission, yeast to budding, Spirogyra to fragmentation. Plant to the part it grows from: potato to stem, onion to bulb, ginger to rhizome. Flower to its pollinator: dull and scentless to wind, bright and nectar-rich to insects. Animal to its habit: frog to external fertilisation, birds to internal.

That is why the questions are worth having. A pair either sits in memory or it does not; it never half-works the way a numerical does. Ten minutes of pairing gives you a mark you cannot lose to a calculation slip.

SSC CGL, CHSL and MTS general science, RRB NTPC and Group D, BPSC TRE-4 Part II and the classroom-framed science items in CTET all draw one or two questions from this chapter in almost every shift.

1. Which of the following organisms reproduces by binary fission?

2. Budding as a mode of asexual reproduction is best illustrated by:

3. A new potato plant is normally raised from which part of the parent plant?

4. Vallisneria is pollinated by which agent?

5. After fertilisation in a flowering plant, the ovary develops into the:

6. External fertilisation is seen in:

7. In human beings, fertilisation normally takes place in the:

8. Which of these animals shows incomplete metamorphosis?