How to Use This Set
These 40 questions cover the whole of Plant Growth and Development, in roughly the proportion the chapter itself gives each topic. Ten of them are growth, how it is measured and how its rates are written; five are differentiation, dedifferentiation, redifferentiation and development; twenty - half the set - are the five plant growth regulators; and five are photoperiodism and vernalisation. That weighting is not arbitrary. The regulators carry the chapter, and a student who can name the five, their chemical natures, their discoveries and their effects has already earned most of what this chapter is worth.
Sit the whole set in one go, and look nothing up. Answer every question in order, and mark every question where you were choosing between two options rather than certain. Those marked questions, not only the wrong ones, are your revision list afterwards. Check the answers only at the end, and when you check, go back to the fact rather than to the option - the fix for a wrong answer here is always a line of the chapter you had not fixed in memory.
The marking is +4 for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong one, and it is worth doing that arithmetic once. With four options and one of them right, a blind guess wins 4 marks once in every four attempts and loses 1 mark on the other three, so four blind guesses are worth about +1 mark between them - almost nothing, for four questions' worth of time. Cut the options down to two and the same four attempts are worth about +6. So the rule is not "never guess". It is never guess blind, and never spend time on a guess. If you can strike out even one option on this chapter - and you usually can, because the wrong options are named regulators you either recognise or do not - the guess is worth making, quickly. If all four still look alike after fifteen seconds, leave it blank and keep the minute.
These are exam-pattern practice questions built on the chapter's recurring core facts. They are not authenticated year-tagged previous-year papers.
Before You Start
Give yourself 40 minutes for 40 questions.
This is a recall chapter. Nothing here is derived and nothing is calculated, apart from a single division if a relative growth rate turns up. Every question is a name, a number, a pairing or a grid - which regulator, which phase, which worker, which day length. That has a direct consequence for pacing: most items should take 20 to 30 seconds, and anything that has not come in fifteen seconds is not coming. A fact you learnt arrives at once or not at all; staring at the option list will not pull it out. Mark it, move, and come back only if minutes are left over.
Four habits carry this set.
Ask "which of the five?" before you read the options. Every regulator question in the chapter is really the same question - auxin, gibberellin, cytokinin, ethylene or abscisic acid - and the wrong options are the other four. Decide the answer from the stem, then look for it. Reading the options first is how a student talks himself out of the right name.
Think in the grid, not in the list. The chapter is examined as one effect against several regulators, and the four pairings that come back again and again are apical dominance - auxin causes it, cytokinin overcomes it; senescence - ethylene and abscisic acid promote it, cytokinin and gibberellin delay it; dormancy - abscisic acid induces it, gibberellin and ethylene break it; abscission - auxin prevents early fruit and leaf drop but promotes the drop of older mature leaves and fruits, and ethylene and abscisic acid promote abscission. If those four lines are secure, a quarter of this set answers itself.
Read the direction word before the options. NOT, EXCEPT, INCORRECT and respectively are the four words that turn a fact you know into a mark you lose. In a respectively question, settle the first item first - that usually kills two options in one step.
Keep the two three-word ladders apart. Meristematic, elongation and maturation are zones along a root. Lag, log and stationary are phases in time on a sigmoid curve. They are not the same three things, and a question that offers one set as the other is the commonest trap in the first half of this chapter.