Becker's World of the Cell 9th Edition by Lewis Kleinsmith, Jeff Hardin, Gregory Paul Bertoni

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Cotton and Potatoes. A cotton fiber consists almost exclusively of cellulose, whereas a potato tuber contains mainly starch. Cotton is tough, fibrous, and virtually insoluble in water. The starch present in a potato tuber, on the other hand, is neither tough nor fibrous and can be dispersed in hot water to form a turbid solution. Yet both the cotton fiber and the potato tuber consist primarily of polymers of D-glucose in (1 4)linkage.
(a)How can two polymers consisting of the same repeating subunit have such different properties
(b)What is the advantage of the respective properties in each case