A nursing instructor is describing the peripheral nervous system to a group of students. The instructor would explain that there are how many pairs of spinal nerves?

31 pairs

Explanation:

Peripheral nervous system composed of neurons outside the brain and spinal cord while the central nervous system is composed of brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system connects the CNS o other parts of the body. The peripheral nervous system may be either autonomic that control the unconscious activities or somatic that control the conscious activities.

Spinal nerves carry the information between spinal cord and body. These neurons are involved in somatosensory information. The divisions of 31 spinal nerves in human body is;

The dorsal and ventral roots connects the spinal nerves to spinal cord and these nerves are formed from combination of nerve fibres. There is an opening between adjacent vertebrae from which spinal nerves originate except the one pair which originate from occipital and atlas bone.

31 pairs.

Explanation:

The group of mixed nerves which connects the spinal cord  with  other organs and structures of the body are called spinal nerves. They are branches of the PNS together with the cranial nerves.  They are  mixed because of  bundles of sensory nerves  which enters the  spinal cord at the dorsal roots as afferent neurons and motor nerves which exit  at the ventral roots as efferent neurons .

Thus they  function in conveying input signals(sensory), output signals(motor) to and fro the spinal cord en route the brain respectively

.

They are 31 pairs  in number, and  are arranged on each side  of spinal cord ,  dangling from  each   segment of the  vertebral column .They are named based on the segments  of the vertebrae column where they originated from,Thus based on this we have  the  8-Cervical nerves, from the cervical vertebrae, 12-Thoracic from the thoracic vertebrae, 5-Lumbar nerves from the Lumbar segments, 5-Sacral nerves and the 1-Coccygeal  nerves from the Coccygeal segments. (Totalling 31 on each side)