--- title: Seeds and fruit and how they travel — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Seeds and fruit and how they travel», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A seed is a baby plant packed with a lunchbox, and the worst place for it to land is right under its parent, where it would fight for --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/) [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/) / Seeds and fruit and how they travel # Seeds and fruit and how they travel Lesson 59 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 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/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/0/) — A seed is a baby plant packed with a lunchbox, and the worst place for it to land is right under its parent, where it would fight for light, water and space, so plants have invented every kind of transport. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/1/) — Some go by air: blow a dandelion clock and each seed floats off on a tiny parachute, and sycamore helicopters spin down slowly so the wind can carry them away. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/2/) — Some hitch a ride: burdock burrs hook onto your dog's fur after a walk, birds eat berries and drop the seeds far away, and squirrels bury acorns and forget half of them, planting new oaks by accident. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/3/) — Some go by sea, like the floating coconut, and some simply explode: on a hot summer day on the heath you can hear gorse pods pop and fling their seeds out. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/4/) — Cartoons show a tomato as a vegetable and a banana full of big seeds; to a scientist a fruit is the part that grows from the flower and holds the seeds, so a tomato is a fruit, and a shop banana has only tiny dots instead of real seeds. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/5/) — Each dandelion seed has a parachute of fine hairs that makes a ring of swirling air above it, slowing its fall so the wind can carry it many kilometres. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/6/) — Sycamore seeds have a wing that makes them spin as they fall, slowing them down; sycamore is a kind of maple, and maple seeds grow in winged pairs. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/7/) — A coconut is a seed in a fibrous, air-filled husk that floats and keeps sea water out; most other seeds would sink and be killed by the salt, but a coconut can float for months and travel thousands of kilometres across the sea and still sprout. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/8/) — Birds eat berries, and the seeds pass through unharmed and come out in their droppings far away; some berries are poisonous to people, so never eat wild berries you cannot name. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/9/) — Burrs are seed heads covered in tiny hooks; George de Mestral invented Velcro in the 1940s after looking at burrs from his dog under a microscope. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/10/) — Squirrels and jays bury acorns and nuts for winter and forget many, which grow into new trees; one jay can bury several thousand acorns in an autumn. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/11/) — Gorse, broom and Himalayan balsam have pods that dry and twist on hot dry days until they burst and fling the seeds out, and the sandbox tree flings its seeds at around 250 km per hour. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/12/) — A fruit is the part of a plant that grows from the flower and holds the seeds, so tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and pea pods are fruits to a scientist, though cooks call them vegetables; cut an apple across and you find a star of seeds. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/13/) — Unripe fruits are often green, hard and sour so animals do not eat them before the seeds are ready; ripe ones turn soft, sweet and bright. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/14/) — The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway stores over a million seed samples deep in a frozen mountain, as a back-up if crops are lost; cold and dryness slow a seed right down, so it stays alive for a very long time. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/15/) — Some lotus seeds found in a dry lake bed in China sprouted after about 1300 years, protected by a very hard coat; seeds that can wait help a plant survive bad years, sprouting when the drought or cold is over. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/16/) — Violet seeds have a small fatty bit that ants love; ants carry the seed home, eat the fatty bit and throw the seed onto their rich rubbish pile, where it grows. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/59-seeds-and-fruit-and-how-they-travel/17/) — Maple syrup comes from the sugary sap of the sugar maple tree in Canada and the USA. - ← previous: [Flowers and pollination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/58-flowers-and-pollination/) - next →: [Trees](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/60-trees/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)