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Sphygmomanometer

Sphygmomanometer
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.23

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    artery, commonplace, unnoticed, failure, physician, medical, version, stress, reading, original, lowest, unit, easily, pulse, term, loss
     content words:    Samuel Siegfried Karl Ritter, Harvey Cushing

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Sphygmomanometer
By Jennifer Kenny 		  
1     Sphygmomanometer is a very fancy name. Do you know what it is? You've probably seen one many times before. What if you knew a doctor uses one? Does that clue help? It's a blood pressure meter. How did such a commonplace medical tool get such a long name? Maybe this will shed some light: The Greek word sphygmus means pulse. Manometer is a term from the science field that means pressure meter.
 
2     The original sphygmomanometer was created by Samuel Siegfried Karl Ritter von Basch. Then an Italian physician came up with a more easily used version. Finally, Harvey Cushing discovered its creation and popularized it.
 
3     In simplest terms, blood pressure is the measure of the force of the blood inside an artery. In order to measure blood pressure, the sphygmomanometer has four main parts. There's an inflatable cuff to restrict blood flow. The manometer is the measuring unit. There's also a tube to connect the cuff and manometer. Finally, on models that don't inflate automatically, there's an inflation bulb.

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