Final answer:
The claim that a liter of arterial blood contains 100 mls of dissolved oxygen is false because only about 1.5% of the blood's oxygen is dissolved in it directly. The vast majority of oxygen is carried by hemoglobin within red blood cells.
Step-by-step explanation:
The assertion that a liter of arterial blood contains approximately 100 mls of dissolved oxygen is false. In reality, only a small fraction of oxygen – roughly 1.5% – is dissolved directly in the blood. The majority of oxygen – about 98.5% – is transported in the form of oxyhemoglobin within red blood cells. The hemoglobin protein binds oxygen and facilitates its transport from the lungs to the tissues of the body.
Oxygen solubility in blood is low due to a low Henry's law constant for O₂ in water. Without hemoglobin to increase oxygen concentration, the dissolved O₂ in blood serum at body temperature is only about 0.010 mM. However, because of hemoglobin, the total dissolved O₂ concentration increases to approximately 8.8 mM. This is almost a thousand times greater than what would be possible without hemoglobin's oxygen-carrying capacity.