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Grade 9/ Science/ Tissues
Chapter 6 · NCERT Class 9 Science

Tissues

A body is not just a bag of cells. Similar cells team up into tissues, each one doing a single job well — dividing, covering, binding, contracting or signalling. Tap each kind to see what it does.

🧫 3 topics⏱ ~25 min📝 12-question quiz
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The kinds of tissue

Plants and animals divide the work between different tissues. Tap each one to see what it is, where it sits and the job it does.

Explore · Types of tissuetap a type

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The three big ideas

  • A tissue is a group of cells that are similar in structure and work together to do one particular job.
  • This is division of labour — instead of every cell doing everything, each tissue specialises, so the whole body works better.
  • Plants and animals have different tissues because they live differently: plants are fixed and have many supporting, dead tissues; animals move and need more living, energy-using tissues.
  • Meristematic tissue — dividing cells at the root and shoot tips; this is how a plant grows in length.
  • Permanent tissue — cells that have stopped dividing and taken a fixed role: parenchyma (packing/storage), collenchyma (flexible support) and sclerenchyma (hard, stiff strength).
  • Two transport tissues run through the plant: xylem carries water upward, and phloem carries food to the rest of the plant.
  • Epithelial — covers and lines body surfaces and organs (protection).
  • Connective — binds and supports: blood, bone, cartilage and ligaments.
  • Muscular — contracts to cause movement. Nervous — neurons that carry electrical messages.

Worked example. Which animal tissue carries messages around the body?

The body's "wiring" is nervous tissue, made of nerve cells called neurons. They carry fast electrical messages from one part of the body to another. (Muscle moves, epithelium covers, connective tissue binds — only nervous tissue signals.)

Common mistake: thinking connective tissue must be solid. Blood is a connective tissue — a fluid one. It still binds and supports the body by transporting food, oxygen and wastes, so connective tissue does not have to be solid.

Where you'll meet it

Tissues at work

Medicine

A blood transfusion replaces a fluid connective tissue; skin grafts and bone grafts move healthy tissue to where it is needed. Knowing how tissues are built is the first step in repairing them.

How plants grow taller

Trees and crops gain height at their tips, where meristematic tissue keeps dividing. Gardeners use this on purpose — pinch off the tip and the plant grows bushy instead of tall.

Check yourself

Competency quiz

Modelled on the competency-based pattern — MCQ, assertion–reason and a case study, testing whether you can use the ideas, not just recall them.

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Interactive built to the OpenMAIC approach (THU-MAIC, MIT). Content from the NCERT Class 9 Science textbook (ncert.nic.in).

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Hi! Ask me about what a tissue is, plant tissues (meristematic vs permanent, xylem and phloem) or animal tissues (epithelial, connective, muscular and nervous).

Buffy is an AI helper and can be wrong — always check your NCERT textbook.

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