The parts
The digestive system mainly consists of the
mouth, the gullet, the stomach, the small intestine, the large
intestine, the rectum and the anus. Ok, let’s move on!
Functions of the parts
The steps to breaking down the food into
substances that the body can absorb are quite complicated. But
it’s like ‘cooking’, and the digestive system has the ‘recipe’
in their ‘minds’ from the day you were born. Here are the steps
to digesting the food completely:
Step 1: The food goes into the mouth
and gets chewed up by the teeth. The small amount of
digestive juice in the saliva digests the food
slightly.
Step 2: The food is pushed to the
back of the mouth by the tongue and goes down a long tube
called the gullet.
Step 3: The gullet leads the food to
the stomach and the digestive juices the
stomach digests the food.
Step 4: The food goes into a long, long
curved tube called the small intestine. The food is
completely digested there and the circulatory system carries the
food to different parts of the body.
Step 5: There are a few more steps! The
undigested food goes into the large intestine and the
water is absorbed there. The undigested food goes into the
rectum and it stays there for a period and goes into the
anus and is passed out as faeces.
If the system/part of the system fails
to work…
The mouth: the body will not be able
to take in food as we put the food in our mouth when we eat.
The gullet: the body will not be
able to transport the food from the mouth to the stomach as the
gullet is the link.
The stomach and the small intestine:
the body might not be able to completely digest the food as only
these (excluding the saliva) have digestive juices which we need
for digestion.
