This is the latest Science challenge posted on Technomaths.
Mrs Mc Cartney says…
“You have a basket full of delicious fruits and vegetables purchased from the market. Your challenge is to group each item into one of two categories; fruit or vegetable.
Post your answers on your blog, along with an explanation of what makes a fruit a fruit, and a vegetable a vegetable. You may wish to take photos, or use magazine pictures to represent your groups, or you can just type your answer. Oh, and one more thing….Can a fruit be a vegetable, or a vegetable be a fruit?”
She then had a list of fruits & vegetables:
- tomatoes
- carrots
- cucumbers
- figs
- squashes
- potatoes
- zucchini
- avocados
- durians
- green, red, and yellow capsicum
- bananas
- peapods
- pumpkins
- mangoes
- apples
- broccoli
So we had to put them into which group we think they belong to, fruits or vegetables. Here is my chart:
Fruit
Tomatoes
Figs
Avocados
Durians
Green, Red, and Yellow Capsicum
Banana
Mangoes
Apples
Vegetable
Carrots
Cucumbers
Squashes
Potatoes
Zucchini
Peapods
Pumpkins
Broccoli
As you would of read from what Mrs Mc Cartney said, her question… Can a fruit be a vegetable, or a vegetable be a fruit? My reply to the question was:
I think the answer to that is that a vegetable can be a fruit. I got the idea of that after reading about how a tomato is actually a true fruit, and how there are some vegetables that can also be used in fruit salads, but I have never heard of a fruit being cooked with vegetables. Also because there are many fruits, but some are just named in the vegetable category for cooking purposes, because they may be used in savory rather than sweet cooking. The term vegetable is more often used as softer eatable parts of the plant such as leaves, stalks, roots, etc.

