Final answer:
Enzymes are essential for living organisms because they speed up biochemical reactions that would otherwise occur too slowly to sustain life. They work as biological catalysts, lowering the activation energy needed for reactions to occur, which ensures the efficiency of metabolism and other vital processes in the body.
Step-by-step explanation:
Why Enzymes are Required for Living Things
Enzymes are required for living things to function because reactions take place too slowly at body temperature and must be speeded up. Without enzymes, the biochemical reactions that are necessary for life would not occur rapidly enough to sustain life processes. In the body, reactions that are critical for survival happen at normative temperatures too slowly to benefit the cell. Enzymes, being biological catalysts, decrease the activation energy of these chemical reactions and thereby speed up the processes. If an enzyme is non-functional in a reaction that requires it, the reaction either stops or proceeds much more slowly, which can lead to various diseases and disorders.
Enzymes have high specificity due to their unique active sites that match only with specific substrates. This specificity ensures that each enzyme only catalyzes certain reactions, contributing to the efficiency of metabolism. Simply put, the presence of enzymes is essential for metabolism and other bodily functions, like the breakdown of food to energy, to occur efficiently and effectively at the temperatures found within living organisms.