if you drop a human cell into pure water in a petri dish, water molecules will pass into the cell membrane, causing the cell to swell or sometimes even burst if it has no active mechanism to expel the water. what process is happening here? question 17 options: metabolism diffusion osmosis cellular respiration

Osmosis is the process by which a solvent moves between two solutions with different solute concentrations over a semipermeable membrane.

Osmosis is the spontaneous net movement or diffusion of solvent molecules through a selectively permeable membrane, in the direction that tends to balance the solute concentrations on the two sides, from a region of high water potential (region of lower solute concentration) to a region of low water potential (region of higher solute concentration).
It can also refer to a physical procedure that separates two solutions with various concentrations by allowing any solvent to pass through a membrane that is selectively permeable (permeable to the solvent but not the solute).
Due to the semipermeable nature of biological membranes, osmosis is an essential mechanism in biological systems. These membranes are often permeable to non-polar or hydrophobic molecules like lipids as well as to tiny molecules like oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and nitric oxide, but impenetrable to big and polar molecules like ions, proteins, and polysaccharides.
In addition to solute size, permeability is influenced by solubility, charge, or chemistry.

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