Answer:
The advantages of using garden peas as a model organism for studying inheritance are:
Easily Cultivated: Garden peas are easy to grow and can be grown in large quantities, making them readily available for study.
Short Generation Time: Peas have a short generation time of one season, allowing for several generations to be studied in a single year.
Clear-Cut Characteristics: Peas exhibit a wide range of easily observable physical characteristics, such as seed color, seed shape, and flower color, which made it easier for Gregor Mendel to study inheritance patterns.
Self-Fertilization: Peas can self-fertilize, which eliminates the need for cross-fertilization and reduces the number of variables to be considered in a study.
True-Breeding Varieties: Peas have true-breeding varieties, meaning that offspring produced from self-fertilization will exhibit the same characteristics as the parent, making it easier to identify patterns of inheritance.
These factors made garden peas an ideal model organism for studying genetics and allowed Mendel to lay the foundation for modern genetics.