2 Answers
Sweat is made by very many—maybe several million—little sweat glands scattered around your skin. They are more tightly packed on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. When seen in a microscope, each gland looks like a coiled-up tube with an opening on the surface of the skin. Its job is to make sweat, which evaporates from the skin and cools your body.
The making of sweat is partly controlled from your nervous system by an automatic reflex. This normally works to make extra sweat when your body gets too warm. When the air temperature around you is above 99 degrees Fahrenheit, you need to sweat just to control your body temperature. Your body usually makes maybe a pint of sweat a day. That much evaporates so easily that you will not notice it. But that might increase to as much as five or ten quarts a day if you are very warm.
Sweat is a dilute solution filtered out of the blood. It is mostly water, with a little salt and a very small amount of organic chemicals. When first made, it is said to be odorless. Evidently, the action of bacteria on the skin causes the odors that some of us have in our sweat.
My mother used to tell me that it was more polite to say "perspiration" than to say "sweat." That may be true in parlor conversation. However in talking about the operation of the body, sweat is the right and proper scientific word for us to use.
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