Exercise 2.7
Cut the tip portion of the root on the slide and put a coverslip. Gently squash the coverslip with your thumb to spread the cells on the slide.
Not cross-checked
NCERT prints no numerical answer for this exercise, so this working has not been cross-checked against the book.
The cut would not heal.
Skin repairs itself by mitosis, the division that gives two daughter cells with the same DNA and the same number of chromosomes as the parent — so the new skin is an exact replacement for the skin that was lost.
Meiosis halves the chromosome number. Each new cell would carry only half the DNA of the skin cell it came from, and a cell holding half a set of instructions cannot work as a skin cell.
Meiosis also stops after making four cells; its products are gametes, not cells that go on dividing. The wound would get one round of unusable cells and then nothing, whereas mitosis repeats again and again until the gap is filled.
Meiosis deliberately creates variation, so even the few cells formed would differ genetically from the skin around them instead of matching it.
On top of all this the body would be making gamete-like cells in entirely the wrong place: the chapter is explicit that meiosis occurs only in the cells of reproductive organs — testes and ovaries.