About Sunflowers…
The Sunflower is an amazing plant.
The head of the sunflower is actually made up of two different
kinds of flowers: disk flowers and ray flowers.
The dark center part is comprised of hundreds of
tiny flowers called DISK FLOWERS.
The disk flowers produce nectar and pollen. This is where you’ll find insects that use the nectar as food. Bees collect the flower's nectar and use it to make honey. Bees are an important pollinator. They pollinate more than 90 different types of flowering plants, including sunflowers. One sunflower seed will grow in each disk flower that a
bee pollinates.
The petals around the disk flowers are called RAY
FLOWERS. Ray flowers can be large or small and vary widely in color, though many are yellow.
Birds love to eat sunflower seeds. The seeds are very rich in
oil. People also like to eat
sunflower seeds because they are healthy and nutritious. The oil in seeds from many plants, including sunflowers, can be used to make BIODIESEL, a type of BIOFUEL.
The Native Americans had many uses for the sunflower. Because sunflowers are a valuable resource they tried to use as much of the plant as they could so as not to waste any of it. For example, they used the flowers
and stalk to make yellow dyes and the seeds to make purple and black
dyes. They dried the seed and
crushed it so they could make cakes.
They also boiled the seeds to make oil and sometimes they used the stalks to make flutes.
Today, we use plants for many things too…as a source of food and medicines,
to make paper, clothes, dyes, and oil. Plants like switchgrass, sunflowers, corn are used to produce ethanol, which is added to gasoline to make an alternative type of fuel for cars called E85. E85 is a mixture that contains 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, which means we use less fossil fuels (petroleum products) to operate our cars. Because there is less gasoline, this alternative fuel burns cleaner and produces less carbon dioxide when used in cars!
Sunflowers, plants and other materials (including some types of garbage) that can be converted into ethanol are called BIOMASS.
Plants of all types are critically important to the planet. Plants are storehouses of carbon dioxide, trapping it and converting it into this gas. This gas is very important to
the whole planet, but especially to people and animals.
The answer is one of the scrambled words below.
 What is Biomass?
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