Digestion and absorption
Each shape here is one villus, a tiny finger lining your small intestine, cut across. There are millions of them, and together they give a huge surface for soaking up digested food. Digestion turns a meal into molecules small enough to pass through them into your blood.
By the end of this page you can
- Describe how teeth, villi and the liver handle food
- Relate each part of the alimentary canal to its function
- Put the parts of the alimentary canal in order
- Define ingestion, digestion, absorption, assimilation and egestion
- Explain how villi are adapted for absorption
Goals tick themselves off as you try the activities below.
Photo: Mikael Häggström, M.D., CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped, JPEG q62.
Villi of the ileum, the last part of the small intestine, cut across and stained.
How often it shows up in past papers
Paper 1 counts come from our past-paper bank of CSEC Biology Paper 1s. Paper 2 is not included yet.
Three jobs from mouth to cell
Food is broken down, absorbed into the blood, then used by the body. Tap each card.
Each part, its job
Food passes through the canal; the liver and pancreas pour juices into it. Tap each part.
What does it do?
Tap a part on the list to see its job.
Food is pushed along the canal by peristalsis: waves of muscle contraction in the gut wall.
The path of food
Put the parts of the alimentary canal in the order food passes through them. Drag or tap each card into its slot.
Where does food go in?
Seven terms to know cold
Say what each term means before you flip the card. The five stages are a common one-mark-each question.
Six quick questions, then a real one
Pick an answer to see why it’s right or wrong.
Which teeth grind food?
In which part of the canal are most digested foods absorbed?
What does bile do?
After a meal, excess glucose is stored in the liver as
The hard outer layer of a tooth is
Removing undigested food from the body is called
exam style · 3 marks
Describe THREE ways in which a villus is adapted for absorbing digested food.
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Practice questions are written by My V.I.P. Academy. They are not official CXC papers.