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Fun Facts About the Heart and Blood Vessels
Did you know…
Your circulatory system of blood vessels — arteries, veins and capillaries — is over 60,000 miles
long. That's long enough to go around the world more than twice!
The adult heart pumps about 5 quarts of blood each minute throughout the body. That’s about
2,000 gallons of blood each day.
The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime.
The heart beats about 100,000 times each day.
By age 70, the average human heart beats more than 2.5 billion times.
Blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate throughout the entire vascular system from the time it
leaves the heart to the time it returns.
Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard — twice as hard as the leg muscles work when a
person is sprinting.
The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on
the other hand, can be so small that it takes 10 of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Sources:
Your Heart and Blood Vessels – Heart Facts. (Cleveland Clinic Miller Family Heart & Vascular
Institute) http://my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/heartworks/heartfacts.aspx
Amazing Heart Facts (Nova Online) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eheart/facts.html