Background Research #2

The article, “Salt of the Earth- How do Plants Cope?”, discusses how salt can negatively affect plants by taking water, as well as causing ionic processes to stop working with the NaCl. If the plant doesn’t have water, which is necessary for a plant to live. In addition, the NaCl in salt can stop the plant from functioning properly due to the Na+ (and Cl-) causing ionic stresses to the plant. If there is too much salt in a plant, it will eventually cause the leaves to wither and die. This can easily kill plants such as crops and other necessary plants that we require to survive.
Based on our research, we learned that salt can take water from plants and that salt can cause plants to stop working properly. From this, we identified fresh water as the control in our experiment and salt water as our variable. We hypothesize that if we water a plant with fresh water and another with salt water, then the fresh one will grow, while the other will die.