Noses Are for Smelling

What's your favorite smell?

Your nose is like a detective, picking up clues and telling you interesting things about your world.

Imagine walking down the street toward your grandmother's house. Her kitchen window is open. You take a deep sniff. Before you even walk through her front door, you know she's baking cookies. How? The delicious scent rises up from the warm cookies and floats through the air.

Your nose has two openings called nostrils. Every time you take a breath, particles of scent move up through your nostrils. When you sniff, more m particles come in, and they move higher up in your nose.

High inside each nostril is a special area that is crowded with tiny hairlike scent detectors. The scent detectors send messages to your brain, and your brain tells you what you are smelling.

Your sense of smell works together with your sense of taste. When you lift the cookie to your mouth, lots of tiny scent particles go into your nostrils. When you chew the cookie, more scent particles travel through the back of your throat up to your scent detectors.

If you hold your nose closed so you can't smell a thing, the taste buds on your tongue may tell you the cookie is sweet. But you might not be able to tell what flavor the cookie is because not enough scent particles reach the scent detectors in your nose.

Of course, not everything smells as good as freshly baked cookies! Bad smells often warn us of danger. The smell of milk that has gone sour or food that has spoiled may make you feel a little queasy. That's a good thing. Your brain makes sense of the nasty scent message it's getting and tells you: "Don't eat that!"

Some animals, such as skunks, can give off a foul odor that warns other animals and people: "Stay away!"

Take a sniffing walk. How many smells can you smell? And what can you tell from the things you smell?

Have fun being a scent detective.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Oct 2005
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved