What I had learned in Term 3

Recently I had done an experiment on plant cells. The experiment was to find and see the specific parts of a plant cell. In a plant cell there is cell wall, cell membrane, nucleus, chloroplast, vacuole and cytoplasm.

The cell wall is a partially permeable cellulose and its use is to support the shape of the cell to give it a regular shape and to protect it. The cell membrane is a partially permeable substance which surrounds the cell and its function is to control the movement of materials that are going in and out of the cell. The nucleus is the brain of the cell. It controls the movement and activities within the cell. It also contains chromosomes which contains hereditary materials. The chloroplast is a tiny disc-like substance which contains the green pigment chlorophyll. Its function is to contain chlorophyll which traps sunlight for photosynthesis to take place. The vacuole in terms of the vacuole within a plant cell, is a single, large vacuole. It contains cell sap to keep the cell firm. In the case whereby the vacuole does not take in enough water, plasmolysis occurs whereby the cell shivels up on the inside creating gaps between the cell wall and the cell membrane, causing the cell wall to collapse and the whole cell being destroyed. Lastly, the cytoplasm is a jelly-like substance that fills the cell, containing water, food and others. It also allows chemical reactions to take place.

These are the basic parts of a plant cell. A plant cell must have all of these parts to survive because each part carries out vital processes to keep the cell alive. After observing the plant cell and its parts, I was fascinated by how complex a plant could be. If a single cell is already so complex with all the different functions and parts, imagine how complex a plant would be. To me, before I knew about the different parts of a plant, I thought that it was just a simple food-making organism. It is amazing how all the functions linked together to form a cell, and having the cells linked together to form a tissue, linked together again to form an organ and the organs linked together to form an organism(the plant). This experiment surely exposed me to the complexity of an organism, making me feeling interested to find out more.