The Respiratory SystemBy: Isabel Garcia

The job of your respiratory system is to bring oxygen into your body, and remove the carbon dioxide from it. Your body needs oxygen to survive.

The Job

Oxygen is used by your cells to perform the function of life.

Oxygen

As your body uses oxygen, your cells make another substance called carbon dioxide.

Too much carbon dioxide can be toxic, even deadly.

This is why it is important that your lungs have a way of getting rid of it.

Carbon Dioxide

As you breathe in, a special organ called a diaphragm pulls your lungs down, and makes them bigger. This causes air to rush into your lungs. When your lungs expand, they fill with air, when your diaphragm squeezes again the bottom of your lungs, air if forced you breath out of your lungs, and you breath out.

Diaphragm

Breathing is both voluntary and involuntary, which means you can control it if you can, but if you forget, your body automatically breaths, without you thinking about it, this allows you to concentrate in other things. If you hold you breath for too long, your brain will interfere and force you to breath.

Breathing

If you don´t breathe, your cells will not get the oxygen they need, and they will start dying quickly. And in minutes, your body will die. This is why breathing is so important.

Breathing

The main organs in your respiratory system are your lungs. When you breathe in, you fill these lungs with air. Your heart pumps blood into the walls of your lungs, and then it absorbs oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. When you breathe out, you release the carbon dioxide into the space around you. Every time you breath, you put oxygen in, and putting carbon dioxide out. Then, from your lungs, blood returns back into your heart where it is pumped out to the rest of your body, carrying oxygen with it.

The lungs

You have two lungs, but they are not like your nose or eyes that are exactly the same size, they have different sizes, your left lung is a little bit smaller than your right lung, this is to give the space for your heart.

Lungs

After all this process, the air finally ends up in the 600 million alveoli, when this millions of alveoli fill with air, your lungs get bigger. Its this alveoli that allow oxygen to pass to your blood

Alveoli

When you breathe out, everything happends backwards, first, your diaphragm relaxes and moves up, this pushes air out of the lungs. Your rib muscles become relaxed, and your ribs move in again, creating a smaller space in your chest.

The air that you breathe out not only contains wastes and carbon dioxide, it´s also warm. This is because air travels through your body and picks up heat in the way!

Breathing out

Above the trachea, is something called the larynx, or most known as the voice box. Across the voice box there are two things called the vocal cords, that open and close to make noises. When you exhale air, it comes throuhg the trachea and reaches the vocal cords. If the vocal cords are closed, and the air goes between them, the vocal cords will vibrate and a sound will be made.

Talking

When you hiccup, it´s because your diaphragm moves in a funny way that causes you to breathe in instantly, then that air hits your vocal cords when you are not ready.

Hiccups

Cigarette smoke can damage the cells of the lungs so much that the healthy cells go away, and they can only be replaced by cancer cells.

Smoking

http://www.kidsbiology.com/human_biology/respiratory-system.php

http://kidshealth.org/kid/cancer_center/HTBW/lungs.html#

Bibliography