When you breathe, a muscle (called the diaphragm) reduces the pressure around your lungs and they expand to fill with air. The table shows the volume of a lung as a function of the reduction in pressure from the diaphragm. Pulmonologists (lung doctors) define the compliance of the lung as the derivative of this function.9
(a) What are the units of compliance?
(b) Estimate the maximum compliance of the lung.
(c) Explain why the compliance gets small when the lung is nearly full (around 1 liter).
