Plants & Zombies

**Plants**

**Plants**, also called **green plants**, are multicellular eukaryotes of the kingdom **Plantae**. They form an unranked clade **Viridiplantae** (Latin for green plants) that includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Green plants excludes the red and brown algae, the fungi, archaea, bacteria and animals.

Green plants have cell walls with cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts, derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. Their chloroplasts contain chlorophyllsa and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are also characterized by sexual reproduction, modular[*clarification needed*] and indeterminate growth, and an alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is also common.

Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but as of 2010, there are thought to be 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, are seed plants (see the table below).[1]Green plants provide most of the world's molecular oxygen[2] and are the basis of most of the earth's ecologies, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form mankind's basic foodstuffs, and have been domesticated for millennia. Plants are used as ornaments and, until recently and in great variety, they have served as the source of most medicines and drugs. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology.

**Zombies**

A **zombie** (Haitian French: *zombi*, Haitian Creole: *zonbi*) is a fictional undead being created through the reanimation of a human corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horrorand fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, where a *zombie* is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but often invoke science fictional methods such as radiation, mental diseases, viruses, scientific accidents, etc.[1][2]

The English word "zombie" is first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi".[3] The Oxford English Dictionary gives the origin of the word as West African, and compares it to the Kongo words *nzambi* (god) and *zumbi*(fetish).

One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was *The Magic Island* by W.B. Seabrook in 1929. This is the sensationalized account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls. *Time* claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".[4]

Zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* drawing on European folklore of the undead. In 1932, Victor Halperin directed *White Zombie*, a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. Here zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician. Zombies, often still using this voodoo-inspired rationale, were initially uncommon in cinema, but their appearances continued sporadically through the 1930s to the 1960s, with notable films including *I Walked with a Zombie* (1943) and *Plan 9 from Outer Space* (1959).

A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian folklore, has also emerged in popular culture in recent decades. This "zombie" is taken largely from George A. Romero's seminal film *Night of the Living Dead*,[1] which was in turn partly inspired by Richard Matheson's 1954 novel *I Am Legend*.[5][6] The word *zombie* is not used in *Night of the Living Dead*, but was applied later by fans.[7] The monsters in the film and its sequels, such as *Dawn of the Dead* and *Day of the Dead*, as well as its many inspired works, such as *Return of the Living Dead* and *Zombi 2*, are usually hungry for human flesh, although *Return of the Living Dead* introduced the popular concept of zombies eating brains. The "zombie apocalypse" concept, in which the civilized world is brought low by a global zombie infestation, became a staple of modern popular art.