Question

Give some dialy examples of osmosis?

Answer 1

Osmosis refers to the movement of one, less concentrated solvent through a semi-permeable membrane to another, more concentrated solvent.

Some examples of Osmosis in everyday life are:-

1. When you keep raisin in water and the raisin gets puffed. When raisins are immersed in water, they swell due to the movement of water into them when the same raisins are immersed in the strong saturated sugar solution, they will show shrinkage due to loss of water into sugar solution
2. When we are suffering from severe sore throat we are advised to gargle salt water. The cells and the tissues surrounding the throat will be swollen up because of excess of water when there is sore throat. The salt water has lower concentration of water molecules than the cells of our throat. So water molecules move from the swollen cells of the throat to the salt water and reduces the pain and swelling of the throat.
3. Plants take water and mineral from roots with the help of Osmosis.
4. If you are there in a bath tub or in water for long your finger gets pruned. Finger skin absorbs water and gets expanded. When our body is immersed in water for a long time, our body look fluffy because water outside our body is less concentrated when compared to water present in our body. Therefore water outside the body is trying to achieve equilibrium with water present in the body through osmosis
5. .It is used for preservation of fruits and meat Meat, fish, vegetables are stored in salt and fruits are stored in sugar. They are easily attacked by bacteria that contaminate them. If sugar and salt are used as preservatives, the microbes lose water and their metabolism will decrease. Therefore the microbes will die.