1. What is dormancy?

2. One fall season, the weather turned very cold in mid-October and temperatures dropped below freezing for two days. This cold period was followed by warm temperatures (in the 80’s) for a period of more than a week. Almond trees, which normally bloom in late February, began to bloom.

Why did this occur?

3. What are primary tissues? What are secondary tissues?

4. Name two lateral meristems and describe the tissues each of the two produces.

5. What is the difference between a pit ray and a vascular ray?

6. What is the difference between the fascicular vascular cambium and the interfascicular vascular cambium? Do they produce different tissues?

7. What is the difference between a fusiform initial and a ray initial? Do they produce different cell types?

8. Why does the cork cambium form and begin producing tissues only after the vascular cambium has been active for a period of time?

9. What is a periderm? How does this differ from bark? What is wood?

10. What is the function of a lenticel?

11. Begin at the pith and name the tissues, in correct order, which occur between the pith and remnants of the epidermis.

12. Why do some stems form multiple periderms?

13. Using a microscope, how can you tell the difference between early wood and late wood in a cross section? How can you tell the difference between early wood and late wood with the naked eye in a cross section?

14. What is a growth ring?

15. Why do the growth rings of an individual plant sometimes vary?

16. How will the growth rings of Douglas fir plant of the Coast Ranges (mild temperatures and moisture year around) compare with a Douglas fir plant growing at 4500 feet in the Sierra Nevada (cold temperatures from October through April; non-frozen moisture available only in spring).

17. Dendrochronology has provided the information that the oldest known plant is 4900 years old. How was this information obtained? What type of information does dendroclimatology provide?

18. Why is the secondary phloem generally much smaller in size than the secondary xylem, and why does it have no growth rings?

19. On a wood cross section under the microscope, how can you tell the difference between non-porous, diffuse porous, and ring porous? Which is the only type that you can distinguish with the naked eye?

20. How can you tell a radial section from a tangential section under the microscope?

21. On a 4X6 wooden beam, how can you tell whether any of the "long" surfaces are radial sections?

22. What’s the difference between heartwood and sapwood? Do they differ in function? Do tyloses occur in heartwood or sapwood? What are tyloses?

23. What is the difference between hardwood and softwood? How do the cell types in these differ?

24. What is the difference between a uniseriate and multiseriate vascular ray?

25. What is the difference between a loose knot and a tight knot? How are they different in appearance?

26. A gardener absentmindedly put his trowel (small shovel) in the branches and forgot where he had put it. He was not able to locate the trowel until several years later. When he tried to remove it from the tree, he found that he could not do so. Why?

27. How can you tell pith from heartwood?

28. What are minerals and how do they enter the plant? Why does a plant need minerals?

29. How are tracheary elements different from sieve elements?

30. Botanists believe that the Cohesion-Tension Hypothesis explains how water moves upward in the xylem. What is cohesion? Why is cohesion a necessary part of the water conduction process? What creates "tension"?

31. Recently transplanted plants are not able to absorb water from the soil. Why would it be a bad idea to transplant on a hot, dry, windy day?

32. At night, the stomata close and transpiration stops. What keeps the water in the xylem from falling to ground level in a 20 foot tall plant?

33. Why does guttation occur?

34. Translocation is the long distance transport of sucrose in phloem. What is the direction of this transport?

35. If you added a water soluble poison to the soil of a pot containing a plant during the day, would water conduction be affected? What about food conduction? What part of these processes would be affected?