We have a gut feeling that you’ll like this highly digestible quiz. Are you hungry for a 5/5?
#1. Where does your food go after leaving your stomach?
#2. True or false? Poo is brown because the digestive system mixes the pigments from all the foods you ate.
Nearly all the pigments in your food get digested, broken down or absorbed before they become poo (red from beetroot being one exception). Poo is always brown because your body is always getting rid of old red blood cells. As part of that process, a brown chemical called stercobilin comes out of your intestine and into your poo!
#3. As your digestive system breaks down your food, the ball of former food gets new medical names. Which of the following is NOT one of those names?
The chewed-up ball of food that you swallow is called a bolus. Once the bolus reaches the stomach and mixes with stomach juices, it is called chyme. As chyme travels through the small intestine, it gets thicker and picks up waste. After traveling through the large intestine, the chyme is called stool or feces. Gurgitate is a made-up word!
#4. The small intestine is where we absorb most of our nutrients from food. If you flattened out an adult’s small intestine, how big of an area would it cover?
Even though the small intestine is just a 3-centimetre wide tube, it is long, it has lots of folds and it is covered by lots of finger-like structures called microvilli. All these features increase the area inside of the small intestine that food can touch as it goes through – all the better to absorb nutrients!
#5. Which of the following can cause you to fart?
Yep, swallowing air can make you fart – you might swallow excess air if you eat or drink too fast, suck on hard lollies or drink fizzy drinks. Eating high fibre foods can make you fart for a different reason. Healthy bacteria in your gut break the fibre down and make gas in the process!
Results
Congratulations! You are a real science whiz!
Oh dear! Better brush up before the next quiz!
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