Try to imagine yourself, sitting down to lunch, enjoying your sandwich and a few strawberries along the way. Once you've finished your delicious meal, take one last sip of orange juice and head to your next class. In a few minutes you will be thinking about your next visit to the mall. You completely forgot about that sandwich you just ate. But it's still sitting in your stomach!! Now, how does it work? How did your body absorb all that food? It all goes back to the digestive system. http://kidshealth.org/kid/cancer_center/HTBW/digestive_system.html (I did not copy the direct quotes, however I had used the idea from the beginning in my research on the digestive system to help the reader to better understand the system) The main purpose of your digestion system is to break down and absorb the energy and nutrients it needs from the food you eat. The sandwich, strawberries and orange juice you just consumed are going through this process right now! The digestion process begins with ingestion, which is when you take a bite of what you planned to eat. When you took a bite of your sandwich and strawberry slices you were essentially starting the digestion process. Secondly there is the work of digestion, which is a much longer and more complex process for your digestive system. It starts when you start chewing your food. There are two known types of digestion, these include mechanical digestion, which happens when you physically "break food down into smaller pieces", for example by chewing a hamburger and getting the result into several pieces, and chemical digestion which happens when it chemically breaks down downing food, for example eating a slice of br...... middle of paper...... I ate, to break down the food into a liquid mixture and slowly empty that liquid mixture into the small intestine. Once the bolus enters the stomach, it begins to be broken down with the help of the strong muscles and gastric juices found in the stomach walls. Gastric juices are made up of hydrochloric acid, water and mucus and the main enzyme inside the stomach is the so-called pepsin, which needs to be surrounded in an acidic environment in order to do its job, i.e. break down proteins into Bass. Once the bolus has been inside the stomach long enough, it begins to form into a liquid called chyme, and what stops the chyme from flowing back into our esophagus are the ring-shaped muscles known as sphincters located at the beginning and at the end of the stomach and have the task of controlling the flow of solids and liquids.