Question

A student purchases and weighs 5 pounds of carrots from a local grocery store. She notices that the grocery store constantly sprays its produce with distilled water. After returning home, she weighs the carrots again and discovers that they weigh only 4.2 lbs. They also no longer seem as crisp and taut. Provide a possible explanation for why the carrots weighed more at the store, based on the information learned in this lab.

Answer 1

When the student purchases and weighs 5 pounds of carrots from a local grocery store, the constant spraying of distilled water causes the excessively hypotonic solution to get endosmosis-ed into the carrot cells and this makes up for the difference of 0.8 lbs by the time she goes back home, because udner normal circumstances, that water will go back to the atmosphere as moisture.
This process is osmosis, which is the movement of water across a semi-permeable membrane, from an area of higher concentration to an area of lower concentration.