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Asked by egg fried rice;] to Hazel, Ellen, Elliot, Rupesh, Thomas on 13 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by goldensarah2003.
Question: why is the grass green
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Elliot Jokl answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hello and thanks for the question!
Grass is green because it has lots of a green pigment called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is central to the process of photosynthesis, where plants take up carbon dioxide and water and use sunlight to turn it into sugar and oxygen.
There are other pigments that can do the same job, so you might sometimes see plants that always have reddish leaves rather than green. In that case, a red pigment is being used to get the energy from the sunlight.
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Rupesh Paudyal answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hello Sarah,
Top question!
Grass along with leaves and cyanobacteria are green because of the pigment material called chlorophyll, which is required to carry out photosynthesis using sunlight, just like Elliot said.
For photosynthesis to take place, chlorophyll needs to absorb light. I don’t know if you know the light spectrum or not but it goes from Violet (V), Indigo (I), Blue (B), Green (G), Yellow (Y), Orange (O) and Red (R).
But the reason why chlorophyll is actually green is because it absorbs a lot of violet, indigo, blue, orange and red light. So the only thing left is mostly green, which is what we see.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 14 Jun 2016:
As the guys have said grass contains chlorophyll which absorbs light in order to make energy but it doesn’t absorb green so this is reflected back.
This idea applies to the colour of all things. If an object is black it’s because it absorbs all the light while a white object reflects all of the light that’s why if you put both of these objects in the sun the black object would start to feel very warm but the white object would still be about the same temperature.
Give it a go and let us know how you get on!
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