Question

The fruits of cotton plants are called
A) Calotropis
B) Cotton balls
C) Xanthium
D) None of the above

Answer 1

Hint: The fruit of the cotton plants contains the cotton seeds which will grow i.e. the cotton seeds become fully mature and give the cotton fiber which is used to weave the clothes.

Complete step by step answer:
So we have to identify the fruit of cotton plants from the given options.
We know that cotton is one of the major agricultural crops in various countries and the cotton cultivation has a huge influence in the economy of these companies. The economic importance of cotton cultivation is due its huge commercial applications in various forms that are consumed by human beings.
The fruit of the cotton plant is having a green colour which is developed from a flower. The fruit of cotton plant is spherical in shape, it is a segmented pod which contains four segmented portions.
The fruit of the cotton plant contains 32 immature seeds, because of which the spherical shaped structure is called as the fruits, since they have seeds in them and these immature seeds grow to give the fully developed cotton fiber.
The spherical green structure is called a ball, so the fruit of the cotton is called the cotton ball.
Each cell present in the cotton ball grows and starts to elongate when the pink flowers start to fall off.
The cotton ball grows and becomes thicken within one month which forms a hollow cotton fibre inside the cotton ball, which grows into a size of a fig with time. It almost needs 25 days more (from the day petals of the flower start to fall off) for a cotton ball to get fully mature. It takes about 40-55 days for a cotton ball to burst out to yield the natural cotton along with the segments.
The dried up part (carpel) is called the bur, it is the bur that holds the cotton in its position till the cotton is completely dried, grown and matured which is ready for the harvesting process.

So from this we can conclude that the fruit of cotton plant is called cotton balls which is option (B).

Note: There is a chance of getting confused with the white colored fully grown ball with the immature green colored ball. The green colored ball (Cotton ball) is the fruit of cotton plants, since they only have the seeds in them.