How often does the human heart beat?
Your little heart began to beat when you were an unborn baby, and it will. Beat, beat through every hour of your life, day and night. Its rhythm is sometimes faster and sometimes slower, depending upon the work it has to do. In an average year it beats over 37 million times. The doctor clocks the rate of your heartbeat when he takes your pulse. He feels the throbbing beat of the blood pulsing through a large artery in your wrist and times the pulse on his watch, second by second. He figures haw many times your busy heart is beating in a minute, and if the pulse is faster than normal you mar have a fever. A healthy heart whispers lub dub rest, lub dub rest with a steady rhythm. Each minute its pumping pulse pushes five quarts of blood on its way through the body. The never ending stream flows through a network of veins and arteries. If all these blood vessels were in a straight line, they would reach almost three times around the wide waist of the world. The pulsing heart must keep the
