Lungs and breathing Lesson 66 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 Every cell in your body needs oxygen from the air, and your lungs are where the air and the blood meet. 1 Lie on the grass and watch your tummy rise and fall: a dome-shaped muscle under your lungs, the diaphragm, pulls down, the chest gets roomier, and air rushes in through your nose. 2 The air goes down the windpipe into branching tubes like an upside-down tree, ending in hundreds of millions of tiny bubbles where oxygen slips into the blood and carbon dioxide slips out. 3 Breathe on a cold window and the mist shows that the air you breathe out is warm and wet from inside you. 4 Your nose cleans the air, a sneeze blasts out dust, and the same breath makes your voice when it buzzes past your vocal cords; whales breathe air too, but fish take their oxygen from water with gills. 5 The lungs are two spongy organs in the chest; a child's lungs hold about 2 to 3 litres of air and an adult's about 6 litres. 6 The left lung is a little smaller than the right to make room for the heart. 7 Breathed-out air is warm and full of water vapour, which turns into tiny droplets of mist on cold glass. 8 The diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle under the lungs, pulls down when you breathe in, making more room in the chest so air rushes in; a hiccup is a sudden jerk of the diaphragm. 10 Spread out flat, all the alveoli would cover an area roughly the size of half a tennis court, a huge surface for oxygen to pass into the blood. 11 When you run, your muscles need more oxygen and make more carbon dioxide; the brain senses the extra carbon dioxide and makes you breathe faster and deeper, and you keep panting for a while after you stop, until the extra carbon dioxide is out and the oxygen is made up. 12 The nose warms and moistens air, and its hairs and sticky mucus catch dust and germs before they reach the lungs. 13 A sneeze is a reflex that blasts air out of the nose and mouth to clear something irritating, like dust or pepper. 14 Nobody knows for sure why we yawn; one idea is that it helps cool the brain, and yawns are catching, so seeing someone yawn often makes you yawn. 15 Your voice is made when air from the lungs passes the vocal cords in the voice box, the larynx, making them vibrate; the mouth and tongue shape the sound into words. 16 Cigarette smoke damages the tiny hairs that clean the airways and the alveoli and leaves sticky tar in the lungs, which is why smoking is banned near playgrounds in many places. 17 Whales breathe air through a blowhole on top of the head; the blow is warm breath and spray, and some whales can hold their breath for over an hour. 18 Fish take oxygen from water with gills, thin feathery parts full of blood vessels; water goes in through the mouth and out over the gills, and out of water the gills collapse, so the fish cannot get oxygen. ← previous The heart and bloodnext → Digestion: the journey of a sandwich↑ back to Biology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/66-lungs-and-breathing/