Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.
You might not think of plants as particularly talkative, but they can 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 their neighbours to start building up their defenses against threats.
The research began after a University of Delaware plant specialist agreed to mentor a 16-year-old named Connor Sweeney on a research project. The excited high school student got to work immediately, spending all his free time, including weekends and summer breaks, in the lab at the university.
He first had to grow plants, known as mustard weed, for use in experiments which is not actually as easy as it sounds. He placed the seeds in Petri dishes and test tubes filled with jelly to promote growth. The seeds generally germinated about six days later and began to change into delicate three-inch saplings with bright green leaves.
After the plants had grown to a sufficient size, Sweeney sliced a leaf in two places -copying 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 had grown considerably longer and even had sideways offshoots. Sweeney then repeated the experiment multiple times to check the findings. To his surprise the results were the same! To see what was making the roots grow in these different ways, the university scientists conducted further tests and discovered that the injured plants were releasing chemicals to warn their neighbours of the impending danger. They believe that the healthy plant was growing its roots to absorb more nutrients to strengthen its defenses. As a result, the two scientists began looking for compounds that plants make to increase growth. Sure enough, each time an injured plant sent out a warning, the neighbouring mustard weeds began producing and using plant growth hormones.
The researchers were not sure why the plants actually communicated with each other. But the evidence from their research suggested that there was something more to look into. The plants were clearly in communication, and although it was originally thought that plants were always in competition with each other, this now seems not to be the case, or at least the relationships between them is different to what we as humans see as competition. Although this was not the first study that has analysed plants 'talking' to one another, it was the first to recognise how they communicate. In previous studies done on trees, scientists discerned that when warned about a possible insect attack, nearby uninjured trees begin producing large amounts of bug-repelling chemicals to ward off the attack. These are amazing observations that seem almost fictional. The idea that the plants around us are in constant communication with each other and there needs to be further research to find out if different species of plant can communicate or to see if they 'speak different languages'.
How long did it take for the experiment to work?
A6 days
B2 days
COvernight
DImmediately
its not written overnight