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Plants play an extremely important role in our lives. We use plants for many different things including food, lumber, medicine and much more. Most of the world’s food source comes from corn, wheat and rice, which are three flowering plants. Corn was first cultivated in Central America about 7,000 years ago and was developed from a plant called teosinte. There were over 300 different varieties by the time the Europeans were exploring Central America. Today, we only six varieties: sweet, pop, flour, dent, pod, and flint. Wheat was first cultivated in the Near East (Iran, Iraq) in about 8000 B.C., and was thought to be the earliest cultivated plant. Wheat was brought to America around the 1520’s by early settlers and now is the largest producer of wheat in the world. Rice was discovered in Asia thousands of years ago, and it grew in swamps. We are familiar with the two kinds of rice, brown and white. Leaving the seed coat and embryo on the grain of rice creates brown r