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The Diffusion Of Water Across A Permeable Membrane Essay

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INTRODUCTION
Osmosis is the “diffusion of water across a selectively permeable membrane” (Raven et al. G-16). In this experiment, dialysis tubing was used to mimic the selectively permeable membrane to show what osmosis does when placed in different solute concentrations. We filled the dialysis tubes with different percentages of solute and placed them in beakers full of another percentage of solute. Through this experiment, I saw what happens when the tube becomes hypertonic, hypotonic, and isotonic. “If two solutions have unequal osmotic concentrations, the solution with the higher concentration is hypertonic, and the solution with lower concentration is hypotonic.” (Raven et al. 98) “When two solutions have the same osmotic concentration, the solutions are isotonic.” (Raven et al. 98) My hypothesis was that the bags placed in hypertonic solutions would shrink because the water would leave the bag to go to the higher concentration. The bags placed in isotonic solutions would stay the same weight because the water would be going in and out evenly. The bags placed in hypotonic solutions would swell because water would rush into the cell where the higher concentration was. If bag A shrinks then it is hypertonic. If bag B stays the same, then it is isotonic. If bag C and D swell, then they are hypotonic.
METHODS
To conduct this experiment we used four pieces of dialysis tubing, four pieces of string, one beaker filled with 10% sucrose and another beaker filled

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