A cell is placed in a solution that is hypotonic to the cell. Which of the following best describes movement of water in this situation? a. Water will only flow into the cell. b. Water will only flow out of the cell. c. Water will flow into and out of the cell, but the overall net movement will be out of the cell. d. Water will flow into and out of the cell, but the overall net movement will be into the cell.

Video transcript

Hello everyone. And in today's video we have the following problem. If a cell is placed in a hyper tonic solution, what will happen to the cell and just remember that because of osmosis, water tends to move from low solute concentrations too high salt concentrations. So keep that in mind as we solve the problem. Now, let me just quickly help you recall what each of the following types of solutions or just the three types of solutions a cell can be placed in. So for example if a cell is placed in a hypothalamic solution, it means that there will be a lot of solute inside of the cell or the soul. Your concentration inside of the cell is high while the solar concentration outside, while the solute concentration outside is very low, this causes water to go from inside from outside of the cell to into the cell because it has a higher solute concentration inside inside of the cell. This causes the cell to swell. Now moving on, we have a hyper tonic solutions here we have a solid concentration that is higher on the outside. When this happens, the solute concentration on the outside is going to cause the water molecules on the inside to leave the cell shrinking the size of the cell and when we have an isotonic solution we have equal solute concentrations and nothing will really happen. Osmosis will not take place because the gradients are equal. Now we're looking at hyper tonic solutions in our question. So like we said water will move out of the cell and into the solution because the solute concentration there is much higher. Because of these answer choice B is going to be the final answer to our question. I really hope this video helped you and I hope to see you on the next one.