explain how plants produce oxygen? plz explain step by step.
Answers
Answer:
How come plants produce oxygen even though they need oxygen for respiration? Answer 1: By using the energy of sunlight, plants can convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and oxygen in a process called photosynthesis. As photosynthesis requires sunlight, this process only happens during the day.
We often like to think of this as plants `breathing in carbon dioxide and `breathing out oxygen. However, the process is not exactly this simple. Just like animals, plants need to break down carbohydrates into energy. Oxygen is required to do this. Then why do the plants get rid of all the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis? The answer is, they do not. Plants actually hold on to a small amount of the oxygen they produced in photosynthesis and use that oxygen to break down carbohydrates to give them energy.
But what happens at night when there is no sunlight which is needed in photosynthesis? Interestingly, in order to maintain their metabolism and continue respiration at night, plants must absorb oxygen from the air and give off carbon dioxide (which is exactly what animals do). Fortunately for all of us oxygen breathers, plants produce approximately ten times more oxygen during the day that what they consume at night.
Plants break down sugar to energy using the same processes that we do. Oxygen is needed to break the sugar into carbon dioxide, releasing energy the plants can use to stay alive.
However, plants also take in energy from the sun(light), carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water from the soil; they use all of them in order to make sugar, and release oxygen. (They use the 'carbon' in carbon dioxide to build the sugar molecule). Since there's no sunlight at night, this gives the plants a way to stay alive, even when there's no light.
However, plants use sugar to build pretty much everything! Cellulose, the hard stuff in plants, is just a bunch of sugar molecules linked together. We can't digest it though, but some animals can. Similarly, plants make starch (sugar linked together, but not as tightly) to store energy for when it's dark. We're able to digest starch.
Since the plants use the sugar they make for more than just energy, they produce more oxygen than they use.
Great question! Plants produce oxygen, because when they photosynthesize, they take carbon dioxide (CO2; a gas-form of carbon bonded to two oxygen molecules) and water (H2O; an oxygen bonded to two hydrogen atoms) and combine them using light energy to produce sugars and oxygen. This stores the energy in chemical bonds (in the sugars) and releases O2. The chemical equation for this is:
6CO2 + 6H2 C6H12O6(sugar) + 6O2
The plants use those sugars like we do when we consume them, for energy. Plants use the sugars they make by oxidizing them (with O2, just like us) to release the energy stored in the bonds. They release CO2 (just like us, when we breathe). But, when plants are photosynthesizing, they release more O2 during photosynthesis than they will consume in respiration (oxidizing the sugars they have made). They release the oxygen through the same pores that allow the CO2 to enter their leaf cells.
Explanation:
Oxygen is a by-product released when plants engage in photosynthesis, the process they use to produce their own food. The chemical events that occur during photosynthesis are complex. The result is that six carbon dioxide molecules and six water molecules become six glucose molecules and six oxygen molecules. The word "photosynthesis" means "making things with light."