Question

Gregor Mendel was born in
A) Austria
B) Russia
C) Czechoslovakia
D) United Kingdom

Answer 1

Hint: Gregor Johann Mendel was a meteorologist, mathematician, biologist, Augustinian friar and the abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia. He has posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics.

Complete Answer:
Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire, which is today's Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia). Farmers had known for millennia that the crossbreeding of animals and plants could favour certain desirable traits. Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of that knowledge. Known as the rules of heredity, they are now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: height of the plant, shape and colour of the pod and seed and the flower position and its colour. Taking seed colour as an example, Mendel showed that when a true-breeding yellow pea was crossed with a true-breeding green pea, their offspring always produced yellow seeds. However, in the next generation, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1 green to 3 yellow. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms "recessive" and "dominant". The green trait, which seems to have vanished in the first filial generation, was termed recessive and the yellow was termed dominant. He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of certain invisible "factors” which can be used to predict the traits of an organism. Those invisible factors are now known as genes.

Note:
Mendel became a monk in part because it would have enabled him to obtain free education. Born Johann Mendel, he was given the name Gregor (Řehoř in Czech) when he joined the Augustinian monks.