Fruit Crops Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Strawberry is developed from a single flower with an apocarpous pistil, meaning many free carpels, and it is an aggregate fruit; the fleshy part is the enlarged receptacle carrying the small achenes.

Fig and jackfruit are multiple fruits formed from many flowers of an inflorescence, and pineapple is also a multiple fruit, so they do not come from a single flower.

A simple fruit comes from a single flower with one pistil, an aggregate fruit from one flower with many free carpels, and a multiple fruit from many flowers of an inflorescence. Strawberry is the aggregate type among the options, and fig, pineapple and jackfruit are multiple fruits.

Answer: B

Guava is climacteric: it shows a rise in respiration and ethylene production at ripening, and it ripens after harvest.

Grape, litchi and pomegranate are non-climacteric fruits that must ripen on the plant and do not improve after harvest.

Climacteric fruits such as guava, mango, banana and apple can be harvested mature and ripened off the plant, while non-climacteric fruits such as grape, litchi and pomegranate do not ripen further after picking.

Answer: A

Warm days and cool nights give the best flavour in pomegranate, because the cool nights help the colour and sugar-acid balance of the arils develop. This is the answer the key gives.

High humidity and high rainfall encourage fungal disease and cracking, and high calcium is not a flavour requirement.

Pomegranate colour and sugar develop best in hot, dry days with cool nights during fruit ripening, and humid or rainy weather lowers quality and promotes cracking and disease. This agrees with the key.

Answer: B

The key gives AAA for Amrit Sagar. Banana cultivars are classed by genome group from the wild species Musa acuminata (A) and M. balbisiana (B), and the Cavendish-type dessert bananas are AAA. I could not confirm the group of Amrit Sagar from a source, so this rests on the key.

AAB and ABB are groups of plantains and cooking bananas, and AB is a rare diploid.

The Cavendish group of bananas, which includes Dwarf Cavendish and Robusta, is the AAA genome group, so the key places Amrit Sagar in that group of table bananas. Plantains are AAB and the cooking banana Monthan is ABB.

Answer: D

Epilithic orchids grow on rocks. The word comes from the Greek for ‘on stone’. Epiphytic orchids grow on host plants, terrestrial orchids on the ground, and saprophytic orchids on dead organic matter.

These are the other options in the question.

Orchids are grouped as terrestrial (on the ground), epiphytic (on trees), lithophytic or epilithic (on rocks) and saprophytic (on decaying matter). The word epilithic therefore points to rocks.

Answer: A

Lucknow-49 (Sardar guava) was developed by selection from seedling variation of the variety Allahabad Safeda. Selection is the breeding method.

It is not a mutation, hybrid or introduction.

Lucknow-49 was selected from seedlings of the Allahabad Safeda group and is also called Sardar. Selection is the simplest breeding method for a vegetatively propagated fruit tree.

Answer: D

Methley, Kelsey and Mariposa are varieties of plum, among the Japanese plums (Prunus salicina) grown in India. They are not peach, pear or phalsa varieties, which have their own cultivar names.

Plums are stone fruits like peach, but the names listed are well known in the plum group, and the key gives plum.

Answer: A

Dioecy, with male and female flowers on separate plants, is observed in papaya. Both a male and a female plant are needed for fruiting.

Mango and banana bear male and female or hermaphrodite flowers on the same plant, and coconut is monoecious.

In papaya the sexes are on separate plants in the common dioecious types, so a seedling is only known as male or female at flowering. Mango has both male and hermaphrodite flowers on one tree, banana has male and female flowers in one inflorescence, and coconut is monoecious.

Answer: A

The key gives a simple sigmoid curve for the fruit growth pattern in citrus. A single sigmoid shows slow growth, then rapid growth, then a levelling off. Many textbooks class citrus as single sigmoid, though some describe it differently, and I could not confirm it from a source.

Double sigmoid is the pattern of stone fruits and guava, and triple and fourth are not growth patterns of fruits.

The key gives the single (simple) sigmoid pattern, in which growth is slow at first, rapid in the middle and slow again at the end. The double sigmoid pattern has a pause in growth between two rapid phases.

Answer: C

The fruit growth pattern in guava is a double sigmoid curve. Growth is rapid at first, slows in a middle lag phase while the seed hardens, and then picks up again as the fruit swells and ripens. This gives two S-shaped phases.

A simple or single sigmoid curve has only one S-shaped phase and a triple sigmoid has three, so options A, B and D do not describe the guava.