2.3 Transport in plants

• Transport systems in plants: xylem and phloem
• Absorption of water and mineral salts
• Translocation
• Importance of transpiration
• Factors affecting transpiration

• describe transport in plants
• investigate factors affecting transpiration
• describe the significance of transpiration in the sustainability of plant life
• appreciate the role of transport in plants

“How does water reach the top of a tall tree with no pump?”

“Why do plants wilt on a hot windy day even when the soil is wet?”

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1. How water and food move in a plant
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Two separate pipelines, and how water gets from soil to leaf with no pump anywhere.
2. Transpiration: the pull that lifts water
   40 min · 2 practice tasks · quiz
   How evaporation from leaves raises water fifty metres, what speeds it up, and why it matters.
3. Root hairs: the plant’s drinking surface
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   How a root hair is built for osmosis, and why a seedling pulled up and replanted often wilts.
4. Mineral salts: uptake against the gradient
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Why minerals need energy, why waterlogged soil starves a crop of nutrients, and how this shows on a Kenyan farm.
5. Inside xylem: dead tubes that hold a tree up
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Lignin, empty lumens and missing end walls — and why wood is mostly old xylem.
6. Cohesion, adhesion and the unbroken column
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Why water molecules hold together in xylem, why a bubble stops the lift, and what root pressure can and cannot do.
7. Inside phloem: living tubes for food
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Sieve tubes, sieve plates and companion cells — why food transport needs living cells and energy.
8. Ringing a shoot: evidence for translocation
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   A practical that separates the two pipelines, and why livestock that strip bark can kill a healthy-looking tree.
9. Stomata and guard cells
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   The pores that make transpiration possible, how guard cells open and close them, and why most sit on the lower surface.
10. Investigating transpiration with a potometer
    40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
    Set up, keep one factor changing, calculate a rate, and know you measured uptake not loss.
11. Other ways to investigate transpiration
    40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
    Weighing a sealed pot, cobalt chloride paper, and vaseline on leaves — methods that work when there is no potometer.
12. Transport, transpiration and plant life in Kenya
    40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
    Why transpiration sustains plant life, how dry-land and crop plants cope, and why this knowledge is a local responsibility.