所在位置：查字典英语网 > 大学英语 > 六级大学英语 > 六级大学英语写作 > Salt and`Metabolism

Salt and`Metabolism

发布时间：2016-03-01 编辑：查字典英语网小编

　　Salt and Metabolism

　　Just how salt became so crucial to our metabolism is a mystery; one appealing theory traces our dependence on it to the chemist ry of the late Cambrian seas. It was there, a half billion years ago, that tiny metazoan organisms first evolved systems for sequestering and circulating fluids. The water of the early oceans might thus have become the chemical prototype for the fluids of all animal life - the medium in which cellular operations could continue no matter how the external environment changed. This speculation is based on the fact that, even today, the blood serums of radically divergent species are remarkably similar. Lizards, platypuses, sheep, and humans could hardly be more different in anatomy or eating habits, yet the salt content in the fluid surrounding their blood cells is virtually identical. As early marine specics made their way to fresh water and eventually to dry land, sodium remained a key ingredient of their interior, if not their exterior, milieu. The most successful mammalian species would have been those that developed efficient hormonal systems for maintaining the needed sodium concentrations. The human body, for example, uses the hormones renin, angiotensin, and aldosterone to retain or release tissue fluids and blood plasma. The result, under favorable conditions, is a dynamic equilibrium in which neither fluid volume nor sodium concentration fluctuates too dramatically. But if the body is deprived of salt, the effects soon become dangerous, despite compensatory mechanisms.

查看全部

上一篇：经济发展与环境保护

下一篇：英语六级作文范文2