This module covers how plants move water, mineral ions and sugars around their bodies. You will follow water from the soil to the air, see how weather changes the rate of water loss, read potometer-style data, separate xylem from phloem, and link each structure to its job.
Check the current Cambridge IGCSE Biology 0610 syllabus for the exact wording in your exam year. Our Biology learning guide shows where this module sits among the others.
What should you already know?
You should know what osmosis and diffusion are, and that a concentration gradient drives both. That comes from movement across membranes. It also helps to know the basic plant leaf from plant nutrition, because the leaf is where the water leaves the plant.
An orienting example
A potted plant is watered well, then placed in a sunny, breezy spot. After an hour the leaves droop. Explain why the plant droops even though the soil is wet.
Step 1, water leaves the leaf: in bright, warm, moving air, water evaporates from the wet cell walls inside the leaf faster than usual and diffuses out through the stomata. This is transpiration.
Step 2, the pull: the loss creates a pull that draws water up the xylem from the roots.
Step 3, the limit: if the roots cannot replace water as quickly as it is lost, the cells lose water and become less firm (lose turgor). The leaves droop.
That single answer used water movement, environmental conditions, structure and cause and effect. It is a good picture of how the five lessons fit together.
In which order should you study it?
- Explain water movement from roots to leaves: the full pathway, because every other lesson builds on it.
- Relate transpiration to environmental conditions: uses the pathway to predict what light, heat, wind and humidity do.
- Interpret a potometer-style dataset with limitations: turns the prediction into numbers and teaches you to question them.
- Distinguish xylem and phloem transport: separates the two transport tissues, which are easy to swap in an answer.
- Connect a structural feature with a transport role: the skill behind most “suggest how this cell is adapted” questions.
Then use the plant transport practice set to mix all five skills.
Which traps catch students most?
- Saying roots “suck” or “pump” water. The pull comes mainly from evaporation at the leaf.
- Writing “food” for both tubes, or saying xylem carries sugar.
- Treating potometer uptake as exactly equal to transpiration.
- Naming a feature without saying what it does, such as “thin wall” with no link to a shorter diffusion distance.
- Mixing up cause and effect in a humidity or wind answer.
How should you use the practice set?
Try each question on paper first, with the book closed. Write the answer in full sentences, then compare it with the worked answer. The practice page routes each type of slip back to the lesson that repairs it.
When the pathway, the tissues and the data all make sense together, you can explain almost any plant transport question from first principles. If they do not yet, online one-to-one Biology tuition gives you a teacher who can trace the gap from your own written answers.