![]() Now, what do we think is going to happen? Well, the first thing that you might observe is we have a lower concentration of solute on the outside than we have on the inside, so at any given moment of time, you will have some water molecules moving in just the right direction to go from the outside to the inside, and you will also have some water molecules that might be in just the right place to go from the inside to the outside, but what's more likely to happen, and what's going to happen more over a certain period of time? The water molecules that are on the outside, and we talk about this in the osmosis video, they're going to be less obstructed by solute particles. ![]() It's permeable to certain things, or we could say, selectively permeable. We're going to assume that the cellular membrane, this phospholipid bilayer, is semipermeable, that it will allow water molecules to pass in and out, so a water molecule could go from the inside to the outside, or from the outside to the inside, but we're gonna assume that it does not allow the passage of the solute particles, so that's why it's semipermeable. I've clearly exaggerated the size of the water molecules and the solute particles relative to the size of the cell, but I did that so that we can visualize what's actually going on. I have the water molecules depicted by these blue circles, and then, I have the solute inside of the solution, inside of the water solution that we depict with these yellow circles. I have three different scenarios here of a cell being immersed in a solution, and the cell is this magenta circle, that's the cellular membrane.
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