Circulatory system (5-6)

How Does Blood travel around the body?

In the body, there are countless amounts of blood vessels. These are pretty much elastic tubes
containing blood but alone, they cannot move. Whenever the heart beats, the blood inside pushes
through the blood vessels, making the blood move and travel throughout the entire body. This entire
system that happens nearly 70 times a minute is the only thing keeping us alive.

The difference between oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood

To start off here’s a fun fact that not many people believe. Blood is not blue; it is actually red, even
when inside your body. The bluish color (the vein) is due to the pressure it is in, under all that skin. The
blood in your vein is actually a dark red color. This is because it hasn’t come in contact with oxygen.
Oxygenated blood is actually bright red, the color that everyone knows. So how does oxygenated blood
become de-oxygenated? The tissues in your body, to survive, need to collect oxygen. So, when ever
blood passes through the tissue, the oxygen diffuses and the blood turns a darker color. The darker
colored blood then assists the tissues by taking the carbon dioxide and waste from it and transports it to
a different location. The blood then goes up into the lungs and collects air, repeating everything all over
again.

Structure of blood vessels and their roles

VEINS ARTERIES CAPILLARIES

muscle YES
Multiple layers of YES YES
tissue
Valves YES
Narrow Structure YES
Easily destroyed YES YES

ARTERIES
arteries are the strongest blood vessels in the human body. The role of the artery is to pump blood, from
your head to your toes. They also have the job of pumping blood away from your heart, carrying
oxygenated blood and transporting blood under large amounts of pressure. Because it always has to
pump blood throughout your entire body regularly, the outside of it is an elastic like muscle. Arteries
also play a major role in medical condition. If by chance the arteries got blocked, the blood would gather
at the heart, causing a heart attack.
Capillaries
Capillaries are the most unheard of blood vessel. They are made up of a single cell that removes
the things that aren’t nutrients and transfer blood from the arteries to the veins. As well as
that, Capillaries also convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, water into salt etc. Because they are
made up of a single cell, they can easily break and appear on the skin as red patches.

VEINS
Veins have the vital role of taking de-oxygenated blood to the heart, where it goes to the lungs
to be oxygenated and then to the kidneys to be cleaned. Veins have a unique structure in which
contains valves. These are there to prevent blood from the other direction mixing with the
oxygenated blood. Nearly opposite to the arteries, veins can only work under small amounts of
pressure and, even though they have it, have only a small amount of the elastic like muscle that
arteries have.

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