Among the Living Trivia Quiz

Answer: Heart

The heart is the driving force of the cardiovascular system - its contractions send blood around two independent sub-circuits. One of these goes to the lungs, where carbon dioxide is eliminated, and returns to the heart carrying oxygenated blood. The other circuit travels around the body, delivering oxygen to the cells, collecting other useful nutrients on the way, and also gathering waste products to be left with the appropriate organ for elimination from the body.

Answer: Thyroid

The endocrine system produces hormones which control a range of body functions. The thyroid is responsible for producing hormones which control the rate of the body metabolism. They also, therefore, affect growth. The most important ones are produced from a reaction in the thyroid between iodine and tyrosine.

A lack of iodine in the diet can cause the thyroid to work overtime, and grow in size, producing a condition known as goitre.

Answer: Skin

The skin is the body's outer covering. Composed of three layers, its functions include holding everything in, keeping foreign organisms out, maintaining a constant body temperature, and detection of the world through the sense of touch.

The integumentary system also includes the hair and nails.

Answer: Stomach

The digestive system is responsible for breaking down the foods we eat so that our bodies can obtain nutrients from the smaller molecules produced. the process starts in the mouth, where enzymes in saliva start the process of breaking starches down into sugars.

The food then travels down the esophagus to the stomach, where acids and mechanical contractions continue the process before it passes on the the small and large intestines. As it passes through the intestines, nutrients are absorbed, so that the residue which reaches the end, and passes out of the body through the rectum, little nutritional value remains unextracted.

Answer: Thymus

The lymphatic system is responsible for the body's defense against invaders from the outside world. The thymus is where T cells, a type of white blood cell that adapts itself to fight specific invaders, matures. They are central to the adaptive immune system, which is also called the acquired immune system.

Answer: Lungs

The word respiration means breathing, and the most obvious organ in the respiratory system is the lungs. It is there that the body absorbs material from the air around us, and returns some of the waste products of metabolism (carbon dioxide and water) to the air as we exhale.

The respiratory system also includes the mouth, trachea and bronchii, which connect the lungs to the outside world.

Answer: Gluteus Maximus

Most muscles are contractile organs (which means they are constructed so that they can make themselves shorter), whose contractions cause the bones of the skeletal system to move. The gluteus maximus is one of the muscles attached to the human hip, and provides most of the shaping of the human buttocks. Its large size is related to the ability to maintain an upright bipedal posture.

Answer: Femur

The skeleton is the group of bones which support the body, and also offer protection for internal organs, allow movement, and produce blood cells. It is made up of nearly 300 bones at birth, the number varying with age, as some small bones fuse during growth to produce fewer, but larger, bones.

The femur, the longest bone in the skeletal system, is the bone that forms the upper part of the leg, and is sometimes called the thigh bone.

Answer: Uterus

Humans are dimorphic (meaning that the two sexes have different physical appearances), and the reproductive system is one of the ways in which the differences are most obvious, as male and female reproductive organs are very distinctive. Both have organs that produce gametes (cells with half the usual number of chromosomes, which can combine with another appropriate gamete to produce the first cell of a new organism), but the actual structures are quite different, suited to the production of sperm in males and ova in females.

After conception, the new cell usually travels to the uterus to become implanted and develop for around nine months.

Answer: Spinal cord

The nervous system is composed of specialised cells that transfer electrical messages from one to the other. These messages may have an external source (such as light falling on the retina, to be transformed into electrical impulses which can be sent to the brain for interpretation) or an internal source (such as some imbalance in the body's chemistry, which needs to be remediated by making some change - too little oxygen may call for gasping of air, for example). Most signals travel from various parts of the body to be collected somewhere along the spinal cord, and continue on to the brain, which is the ultimate control centre for all body processes.