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From our early age up until now we were taught that Oxygen is what we breathe, therefore is important. We use it to breathe and without breathing we can’t survive. That is why Oxygen is very important to our lives and we can’t live without it.
The breathing system (respiratory system) is kind of complicated. I’d like to start from plants because you can start anywhere in a cycle and it would still make sense. And plants are pretty neat. They make their own food and leave some food for animals and us to eat.
Plants use sunlight, water and carbon-dioxide to make sugar as their own food, which is great! Isn’t it tiring to work for money and then use the money for food? Well plants just sit back and relax. This process is called photosynthesis and the outcome from this process is plants making fruits, vegetables and oxygen.
[caption id="attachment_218552" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Bog Plants (Doc: thekrib.com)"]
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[/caption]Millions of plants let out oxygen in the tons! And magically it flows around earth and gets sucked up by your nose. Your nose does a good job cleaning the air because the air is quite dirty filled with dust and pollen.
The Oxygen goes down to the Trachea and into the lungs. The lungs are where everything happens. Oxygen gets into the lungs and gets traded with Carbon-dioxide. The carbon goes out and the oxygen comes in and goes to places in the body that needs that oxygen.
Frogs have a cool way of breathing. They can breathe through their nose and skin. When they dive down into the water, the reason why they can stay long in water is because they breathe through their skin. But in order to breathe through skin the frog needs to be moist all the time, or it will dry up. If humans did that we would have a hard time.
[caption id="attachment_218554" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="frog on a lily pad (Doc: therightcontext.com)"]
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[/caption]So now you know that oxygen is important for humans to live. Then there must be tons of it in the air right? That is correct. There is a lot of Oxygen in the air. But the air isn’t just full of Oxygen. Oxygen isn’t even half the air. Have you ever heard of Nitrogen before?
Nitrogen makes up 70% of the air where as oxygen only makes up 20%. So Nitrogen is 3 times more than oxygen! Why is there a substance called nitrogen floating in our atmosphere? Does it have a purpose? Yes, in fact it serves a good purpose to our environment.
We humans and other animals contain a small amount of Nitrogen in its gas form. That gas of nitrogen is in the famously known amino acid and it helps form protein. And protein rebuilds cells and repair tissues so yeah, their quite important.
But the catch is this. The nitrogen that’s in the air cannot be used for humans. Nitrogen just passes through our body without being interacted with. It must be “fixed” first by bacteria and small living things and also lightning.
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That loud scary lightning does a good job in taking care of the environment. There are 16 millions lightning storms in the world for a year. This just goes to show that something as scary and loud and deadly has a good side to it also.
This is the end of the article so, thanks for reading!