--- title: Flowers and pollination — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Flowers and pollination», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A flower is not there to look pretty for us: its job is to make seeds, and for that, pollen from the stamens must reach the carpel in the middle, --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Flowers and pollination # Flowers and pollination Lesson 58 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/0/) — A flower is not there to look pretty for us: its job is to make seeds, and for that, pollen from the stamens must reach the carpel in the middle, usually of another flower of the same kind; that delivery is pollination. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/1/) — Plants cannot walk to each other, so they hire couriers and pay them in food: a bumblebee visiting foxgloves drinks sweet nectar, and comes out with yellow pollen on its legs and furry body, ready for the next flower. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/2/) — Every flower advertises to its own customers: bright colours and runway lines for bees, long red tubes for hummingbirds, pale petals and strong evening scent for moths, and even a stink of rotting meat for flies. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/3/) — Grasses do not bother with any of that: they throw millions of tiny pollen grains into the wind, which is why so many people sneeze with hay fever in June. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/4/) — Cartoons show bees making honey by squeezing flowers, or a single sunflower as one big flower; real bees turn nectar into honey inside the hive, and a sunflower head is hundreds of tiny flowers packed together. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/5/) — A flower has petals, stamens that make pollen and a carpel in the middle holding tiny ovules, which become seeds once pollen reaches the carpel. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/8/) — Hummingbirds drink nectar from long tube-shaped flowers and get pollen on their heads; their wings beat about 50 to 80 times a second. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/9/) — Grasses and trees like birch and hazel are pollinated by the wind; they make huge amounts of light pollen and have small, green, unscented flowers. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/10/) — The titan arum from Sumatra sends up a flower spike up to about 3 metres tall that smells of rotting meat, attracting beetles and flies; it opens only for a day or two. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/11/) — Evening primrose and honeysuckle open in the evening with pale petals, which show up best in dim light, and a strong scent, and are pollinated by night-flying moths. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/12/) — A sunflower head is hundreds or thousands of tiny flowers, each making one seed, arranged in spirals whose numbers are often 34, 55 or 89. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/13/) — Some orchids look like female insects to trick males into visiting; there are about 28000 kinds of orchid, and in Britain the bee orchid usually pollinates itself. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/14/) — A fig is a hollow ball of tiny flowers turned inwards, and wild figs are pollinated by tiny fig wasps that crawl inside; the fig digests any wasp that dies in it, and many figs sold in shops grow without wasps at all. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/15/) — A dandelion head is about 100 to 200 tiny flowers; it opens in bright daylight and closes at night or in rain, protecting its pollen. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/16/) — Honeybees turn nectar into honey by adding special substances and fanning it with their wings to dry it, as food for the hive in winter; honey is so dry and sugary that germs cannot grow in it, so it keeps for years. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/17/) — Bumblebees can buzz at a special pitch that shakes pollen out of tomato flowers, and farmers use them in greenhouses. - ← previous: [Roots, stems and leaves](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/57-roots-stems-and-leaves/) - next →: [Seeds and fruit and how they travel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)