Introduction:
Humans have to exchange with their environment in order to stay alive and get all the nutrients and air they need. Cells, just like humans, exchange molecules with its surrounding by two processes call diffusion and osmosis. These two processes can occur due to the selective permeable membrane that cells are made off which allow some molecules to cross more easily compare to others. (Brooker et al., 2010)
Diffusion is the movement of molecules following their concentration gradient, from a high concentration area to a lower concentration area in order to reach the same amount on both sides. (Reece et al., 2013) Osmosis, on the other hand, is the diffusion of water across the membrane. This water movement between the cell and it’s surrounding to reach equilibrium is what keeps the cell alive. (Campbell, 2010) Even thought the process of diffusion is the same between every cell, plant and animal cells behave differently to osmosis. If the concentration outside and inside the cell is the same, we refer to an isotonic solution, which means there is not net movement of water crossing the membrane in animal cell while plant cell will tend to flaccid. (Brooker et al., 2010) If instead, the concentration outside the cell is higher than inside; we call those solutions hypertonic and are not ideal to both types of cells. Animal cell would shrivel and loos its entire water and plant cell would plasmolyze losing all its water as well. (Campbell, 2010) The last category of solutions that exist is call hypotonic and is involve when the concentration inside the cell is lower than outside. When this happens, animal cells blow or lyse due to an extreme amount of water that enter the cell while plant cells are in their best environment. (Reece et al., 2013) To increase the amount of molecules crossing the membrane per second during diffusion and osmosis, we refer to its surface area to volume ration. If the object use is small, the radio will be bigger, thus...