Amazing Facts About the Heart and Blood

1.) The heart is not really 'heart'-shaped. It is more like a squashed pear lying on its side.

2.) The heart is about the size of its owner's clenched fist.

3.) When the body is relaxed, each heartbeat in an adult pushes 75 ml of blood out into the blood vessels. So a heart would fill a bathtub in 35 minutes.

4.) If the body was as big as a large city like London or New York, its main blood vessels would be like motorways 150 metres across, and its tiniest vessels would be about the width of a pencil.

5.) If all the blood vessels in the body could be joined end to end, they would go around the world more than twice.

6.) A drop of blood as big as this letter 'o' contains 25 million red cells.

7.) Capillaries are the smallest of a body's blood vessels. A capillary is so thin that even the smallest cells in the body, blood's red cells, have to pass along them in single file.