NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Science Chapter 11 .2.2 Sexual reproduction in flowering plants — In-text Questions

Book page 21411 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

Flowers also enhance the aesthetics of the plants as they are coloured and/or fragrant. How are these features of flowers useful for reproduction?

Answer

Colour and fragrance are not decoration — they are advertising. They bring in the animals that carry pollen from one flower to another, and without that carriage the pollen would stay where it was made.

Colour is visible from a distance and tells a bee, butterfly or sunbird that food is available here.
Fragrance works where colour cannot — at night, and inside dense foliage. Scent molecules travel on air and can be followed by a moth from many metres away.
Nectar at the base of the petals is the reward. The insect comes for the nectar; it leaves with pollen stuck to its body.

Why the plant must pay for a carrier at all: a plant is rooted. Its male gametes are inside pollen grains sitting in an anther, and the female gametes are inside ovules in an ovary, often on a different plant. Something has to move the pollen. Either the wind does it free of charge — and then the plant must make five to ten lakh pollen grains per flower to make up for how wasteful wind delivery is — or an animal does it accurately, and the plant pays it in nectar. Colour and scent are the price of that accuracy.

Tip: the argument runs in reverse too. Wheat, maize and rice flowers are small, green and scentless — because they are wind-pollinated, so spending on petals and nectar would buy them nothing.

Q2.

Explore flowers and their buds on some plants. Record your observations in your notebook. Do you observe thin, flat, green covering, and coloured projections present in both?

Answer

Yes — both are present in the bud and in the open flower, but they are arranged differently.

Part	In the bud	In the open flower
Thin, flat, green covering — the sepals	Outermost, wrapped tightly over everything else	Spread out below the petals, still the outermost whorl
Coloured projections — the petals	Folded and hidden under the sepals; often only a streak of colour shows	Fully expanded and displayed

Why the order never changes: a flower is built as a set of whorls, one inside the next — sepals outside, then petals, then stamens, then the pistil in the centre. The bud is simply that same flower before the whorls have expanded. So a green covering on the outside and colour hidden underneath is what you should expect in every bud you open.

Try this: open buds of different ages on the same hibiscus or rose plant and lay them in a row. You get a picture of the flower unfolding in stages, without waiting for days.

Q3.

Do you think that sepals protect flowers in the bud stage, along with other parts of the flower when it blooms?

Answer

Yes. The sepals are the outermost whorl, and in the bud they completely enclose the petals, stamens and pistil.

Against drying — the delicate parts inside are shielded from sun and wind until they are ready.
Against rain — water would spoil pollen inside the anther before it can be shed.
Against insects — chewing insects would reach the developing ovules if the bud were open.

After the flower blooms the sepals do not fall off in most flowers. They stay below the petals and hold the whole flower together on its stalk, supporting the parts from beneath.

Why sepals are green and petals are not: sepals contain chlorophyll and carry out some photosynthesis, which is useful for a protective covering that must be tough and self-supporting. Petals contain other pigments instead, which is what makes them visible to pollinators but useless for making food. The colour difference follows straight from the difference in job.

Did you know? In a tomato or a brinjal you can still see the sepals sitting on the fruit as the green "cap". The fruit is the ripened ovary, and the sepals that once guarded the bud are still attached at its base.

Q4.

Do all flowers have these two parts? What are the other parts of a flower?

Answer

No, not all flowers have both. A complete flower has four parts — sepals, petals, stamens and pistil — but many flowers are missing one or more of them.

Grasses such as wheat, maize and rice have no showy petals at all; being wind-pollinated, they would gain nothing from them.
In some flowers the sepals and petals are fused, or look alike and cannot be told apart.
A papaya tree bears male flowers on one plant and female flowers on another — the male flowers have no pistil and the female flowers have no stamens.

The other two parts are the reproductive ones:

Part	Sub-parts	What it does
Stamen — the male part	Filament and anther	The anther produces pollen grains, which contain the male gametes
Pistil — the female part	Stigma, style and ovary	The stigma receives pollen; the style is the tube down to the ovary; the ovary holds the ovules, each with an egg cell

The four whorls of a complete flower, following Fig. 11.10 and Fig. 11.11: sepals outermost, then petals, then the stamens (filament + anther), and the pistil (stigma, style, ovary with ovules) in the centre.

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