Why is sweating endothermic

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Find the Best Tutors Do not fill in this field. Your Full Name. Phone Number. Zip Code. Track your scores, create tests, and take your learning to the next level! On average, people have 2 to 4 million sweat glands. Many things, including gender, genetics, age, fitness level and environmental influences, determine how much sweat each gland releases.

Two of the biggest sweat rate factors are weight and fitness level. A person who weighs more is likely to sweat more because the body uses more energy to function, and there is greater body mass to cool down. Most chemical reactions and changes in a physical state involve breaking or forming chemical bonds.

It takes energy to break a chemical bond, but forming a chemical bond produces energy. The two types of chemical reactions are known as endothermic and exothermic reactions. An endothermic reaction takes place when a system takes energy from its surroundings. The system gains heat as the surroundings cool down. Examples of endothermic reactions are electrolysis, melting ice cubes and evaporating liquid water. An exothermic reaction takes place when heat flows out of a system into its surroundings.

But when we say that it doesn't mean that all of these molecules have the exact same motion. The temperature is the average motion. Some of these are bumping around at a faster speed. Or vibrating at a faster speed, or rotating at a faster speed Some are doing it at a slower speed. But as these bump around, they're going to bump into these water molecules and get them moving around.

They would probably be moving around a little bit to begin with, but then the warmer this is, the more energy here, they'll bump into these molecules. So let's say this guy bumps into that, then he'll bump over there , so that energy, this bumping energy, or this kinetic energy, well, some of it will be transferred, or you could even say some of that temperature, some of that heat will be transferred to these water molecules. But the important thing to remember is this is a really kind of crazy thing, they're all bumping into eachother and rotating in all sorts of crazy ways.

They will have an average kinetic energy, which we perceive as temperature, but this one might be going really, really, really fast in that direction, while this one might be going really, really, really slow, this one might be going really really really fast in that direction this one might be going really slow in this direction So the thing to think about is, given that you have all of this variation in the energy of each of these particles, which of these are most likely to escape, to actually evaporate?

And to think about evaporation, you just have to think about that most water molecules or the water molecules that are in that droplet they do have an attraction to eachother, we call those hydrogen bonds. They do have an attraction to eachother, that's why a droplet kind of sticks together.

But if one of these molecules is moving fast enough and if it's moving in the right direction it has a higher probability of being able to escape, being able to actually escape that droplet. And the process of these molecules actually escaping, that's what we refer to as evaporation. If a molecule has enough energy it will escape this, escape the bonds of the other water molecules, and just evaporate into the air. But we still haven't fully answered our question. So let's say that this is one that has evaporated, it has fully escaped.

Why would that actually cool down this entire system? Why would it cool down the droplet and essentially give it more capability to accept more energy from the skin? Well, we just said the ones that have the highest energy are the ones that are most likely to escape, the ones that have the highest kinetic energy. So if you have a bunch of stuff, some are fast, some are slow, some are vibrating a lot, vibrating less but the ones that have a high kinetic energy are the most likely to escape, what happens when they escape?

Well then the average kinetic energy will go down.