| ANSWERS
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1. a. Only 2
tablespoons out of the gallon is fresh water available for use throughout the
world. Five tablespoons is frozen in polar ice and glaciers. The remainder is
salt water. We’re not running out of water. The amount of water on the earth
remains the same. But sometimes, like this year, the water isn’t where we want
it to be.
2. a. Botanically, a
tomato is a fruit, since it is a structure containing the seeds of the plant.
However, on May 10, 1893, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that for
import tax purposes, a tomato is a vegetable (Nix vs. Hedden, 149 US 304
(1893)). The court reasoned that because people eat and think of tomatoes as
vegetables, they should be taxed as vegetables. Incidentally, at the time,
imported vegetables were taxed, while fruits were not.
3. a. Corn is the
number one crop in the US. We eat corn, but in addition, it is fed to more than
¾ of US farm animals. About 100 of the world’s approximately 380,000
different kinds of plants are regularly grown and eaten as food. More than half
the world’s people depend on rice as a daily meal, and another third depend on
wheat.
4. a. An acre is
43,560 square feet. A regulation football field is 360 ft by 160 ft, or 57,600
square feet. So a football field is 1 1/3 times bigger than an acre, not so far
off. An Olympic swimming pool is 50 by 100 meters, or 13,455 square feet, which
is less than 1/3 acre.
5. b. Percy L.
Spencer, a well-known engineer and inventor, was visiting a radar research
laboratory at the Raytheon Company in 1945. Standing by a magnetron, he noticed
a chocolate bar in his pocket was melting! He quickly found a paper bag of
popcorn kernels, held it in front of the device, and proceeded to make the very
first batch of microwave popcorn, thus demonstrating the principle of heating
food with microwaves.
6. b. Tomatoes are
number one of all the fruits and vegetables eaten in the US. Just think, when’s
the last time you had bananas or corn on your pizza?
7. b. Sunflowers are
compound flowers. The sunflower face contains up to 3000 individual flowers,
each of which produces a single seed. The big sunflower face blooms from the
center out – about one inch each day, so it can take a week for a big
sunflower to complete blooming. The large petals around the edge are each also
individual flowers, but they don’t produce seeds.
8. a. There’s a
reason for the phrase "busy as a bee." Honeybees make about 26,000
round trips to produce a pound of honey, visiting many flowers on each trip, so
the total can exceed 2,000,000 flowers for a pound of honey. Bees may visit
225,000 flowers per day per hive.
9. c. Theoretically,
the energy in one ounce of honey would fuel the flight of a honeybee all the way
around the earth! Of course, a worker bee would never take such an extended
vacation.
10. a. It’s pretty
much just the way we name things. In general, pea is a common name for seeds
from the genus Pisum, and bean is used for seeds from the genus Phaseolus. But
chickpeas and Garbanzo beans are two names for the same seed. And how about
coffee beans?
11. b. Our
domesticated corn is far from the wild type. The cornhusks, or leaves, tightly
cover the corn seeds that we call kernels. These husks must be removed for the
seed to reach the soil and sprout.
12. b. Archeologists
believe that peas were domesticated more than 20,000 years ago in northwest
Asia. Peas more than 11,000 years old have been discovered in caves in Thailand.
13. b. About 3% of the
total surface of the earth is used to grow the food for 6 billion people. Only
25% of the earth is land, the rest is covered by water. Half of the land is too
cold, desert, swamp, or mountainous. Three quarters of what remains is not used
because it is covered by cities and development, has poor soil or climate, or is
set aside for other uses, such as recreational, wildlife, or forest lands.
14. b. Wild tomatoes
are from Peru, but the tomato was apparently domesticated in Central America.
The Aztecs and Incas grew tomatoes as early as 700 AD. Tomatoes were brought to
Europe in the 1500’s where they were slow to catch on as a food. Thomas
Jefferson, an avid farmer and gardener, started growing tomatoes at Monticello
in 1781. Tomatoes did not start showing up in recipes in American cookbooks
until the 1820’s.
15. a. Tomatoes are in
the Solanaccae, or Nightshade family, which it shares with peppers, eggplants,
potatoes, tomatilloes, and petunias. When first brought to Europe, many folks
recognized the relationship to Deadly Nightshade and refused to eat tomatoes.
16. b. Sunflower buds
do follow the sun each day. However, when the buds flower, they stop tracking
the sun. Most sunflowers face east once the flower is opened.
17. b. The three
requirements for a sustainable farm (or for any business) are:
Environmental: The
farm is environmentally sound
Economic: The farm is
profitable enough to be self-supporting
Social: Provides good
working conditions and income for its workers and is accepted and supported by
the surrounding community
A sustainable farm
enhances the quality of life for farmers and for society as a whole. We want our
farm to be vibrant and active long after we are all gone, so we work to meet
these goals.
18. a. Sunflowers are
native to the New World. Native Americans grew sunflowers; they ate the seeds,
used the flower heads for a yellow dye, and used the stalks for fiber.
Sunflowers were brought to Europe as a decorative flower, but the weren’t much
eaten until they reached Russia, where they have been widely grown ever since.
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