General Knowledge Trivia Questions › this question
Which body part contains the cornea?
Eye
The cornea is the clear dome at the front of the eye, and it does more focusing work than the lens behind it. Because light bends sharply when it crosses from air into the eye's tissue, and much less when it passes between two watery structures inside, the cornea supplies roughly two thirds of the eye's total refractive power. Its transparency depends on structure rather than any special substance: the collagen fibres are laid down in extremely regular sheets that do not scatter light, and it contains no blood vessels at all, taking oxygen directly from the air and nutrients from the fluid behind it. That lack of blood supply is why corneal transplants are among the most successful of all grafts, since the immune system has limited access to the tissue. It is also why laser vision correction reshapes the cornea: change its curvature and you change where the eye focuses.
Contact lenses have to be oxygen-permeable precisely because the cornea breathes from the air.
Why the other answers are wrong
- Ear. The ear's transparent-sounding structure is the eardrum, a membrane that vibrates rather than refracts.
- Knee. The knee contains cartilage and ligaments, including the menisci, but nothing named cornea.
- Nose. The nose contains cartilage and the olfactory epithelium; the similarity to the word conch or concha, a structure in both ear and nose, is what confuses people.
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