Essay On Sunflower Seeds

Introduction

In today’s world we know of many substances that effect human’s health and quality of life and there are many people around us who are suffering from ill health, disease and the side effects of these illnesses. We do not, however, know as much about the illnesses or growth defects that these same things have on the plants that we rely on for food and oxygen.

This is why I decided to focus my research on the effects that foreign substances have on plants. The substances I will focus on are two of the most common and well known substances that people but in their bodies.

My research aims to establish whether these same substances affect the germination of plants. As I know that sunflower seeds have a fairly short germination span, they will allow me to carry out this experiment more accurately as germination deviations will be clearly identifiable.

For this reason my aim is to determine whether varying concentrations of alcohol and/or tobacco effect or prevent the germination of sunflower seeds. My research question is, “Does alcohol and/or tobacco negatively effect sunflower seed germination?”

I hypothesise that both the alcohol and the tobacco will hinder or prohibit healthy, natural germination of the sunflower seeds and cause any roots that do form to be short, malformed and weak. In total the percentage of germinated seeds will be much lower than that of the seeds in plain water and this effect will be stronger in the 300ml alcohol seeds and the 50 grams of tobacco, 300ml of water solution.

Review of literature

ARTICLE No 1:

‘Growing Sunflowers’ (Growing in the Garden.org, 2014)

Summary: This article explains that sunflowers are easy to germinate but do require light to be strong and not leggy. They discuss ho...

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...enting the initiation of germination. A small amount of tobacco (25 grams in 300ml of water) slows the rate of germination slightly but drops the total percentage of germinated seeds from 58% to 51% and mutates the roots from long, thin, green roots with similar, plentiful secondary roots to short, stubby, spiral, brown roots with few secondary roots. This too confirms my hypothesis and the researched literature. However, my research does not confirm that large amounts of tobacco (50 grams in 300ml) have an even worse effect on the germination of sunflower seeds, as the literature said. This is because the results for these seeds where controversial as the roots were short, spiral, stubby and brown unlike the control which were long, thin, green roots with similar, plentiful secondary roots but the total percentage of germinated seeds was increased from 58% to 69%.