Dicots and monocots

In your book, students soak chickpea (chana) and maize seeds in water for two or three days, then look inside.

Take off the chickpea's seed coat and the seed splits into two parts. Each part is called a cotyledon. Plants whose seeds have two cotyledons are called dicotyledons, or dicots (di means two). Groundnut, rajma and peas split the same way.

A maize seed does not split. It has one thin cotyledon. Plants like this are called monocotyledons, or monocots (mono means one). Wheat and rice are monocots too.

Now the useful part. The seed, the leaf and the root go together:

The book's examples: sadabahar and chickpea have a taproot and reticulate venation. Lemongrass and wheat have fibrous roots and parallel venation. The book says generally, because this is the usual pattern, not a rule without exceptions.

This means you can find out what a plant's roots are like without digging it up. Just look at the leaf. In the book's flowchart, a leafy plant with reticulate venation goes to group A: the dicots, with taproots. One without goes to group B: the monocots, with fibrous roots.