Question

sugar maple (acer saccaharum) is an important tree in the northeastern us and eastern canada because of their precious sap. maple trees are deciduous and lose their leaves each autumn. then, each spring before the new leaves on the tree have emerged, jenny taps her sugar maple trees to gather the sap. the sap is gathered by drilling a hole in the tree and attaching a bucket to collect the sap that leaks out. the sap contains a sugar, glucose, and is boiled down to create maple syrup. the previous summer, the tree constructed glucose (c6h12o6) molecules using photosynthesis. in the spring, where do the water molecules in the sap jenny collects come from? group of answer choices leaves through the phloem root storage through the phloem soil through the xylem atmosphere through stomata in new leaf buds

Answer 1

The water in the sap collected from sugar maple trees in spring originates from the soil and is transported through the xylem.

Step-by-step explanation:

In the spring, the water molecules in the sap that Jenny collects from her sugar maple trees come from the soil through the xylem. Maple trees depend on freeze/thaw cycles to pressurize their xylem and enable the flow of sap, which contains glucose that was produced the previous summer using photosynthesis. When Jenny taps the trees, she is accessing this sap directly from the xylem. This is because the tree's phloem tissue, which also transports sucrose, rapidly seals any wounds to prevent loss of sap, and therefore, very little of the collected sap comes from the phloem.