Your parents gave you an African violet plant as a “dorm-warming” gift. The plant is not doing well. It is wilting and dropping leaves, even though you are watering it regularly. Your roommate believes that the plant must be short on nutrients and has been dousing the soil and leaves with a commercial plant fertilizer.

Questions

1. Do you think a liquid fertilizer would have a high or low concentration of dissolved substances?
2. What effect would adding fertilizer to a plant have on the concentration of solute outside the plant cells?
3. Which direction would this cause water to move?
4. What happens to the cells of the plant when water moves in the direction described above?
5. Consider your answers to questions 1–4 and explain why the original statement bolded above sounds right, but isn’t.