The Human Body
Alex Raynham
Oxford Bookworms LibraryLevel 3
A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Written for Learners of English by Alex Raynham.
You are fast asleep, and nothing is happening. Or is it? In fact, your body is hard at work. Your lungs are taking oxygen from the air, and your heart is pumping blood round your body. Millions of pieces of information are travelling backwards and forwards to your brain all the time. Muscles are repairing themselves, and in your lymph nodes special cells are cleaning germs and waste from the body. You may think that nothing is happening, but in the extraordinary machine that is the human body, it is very busy indeed…
Alex Raynham
The Human Body
THE HUMAN BODY
Most of the time, we don’t even stop to think about our bodies. We talk, work, eat, walk, sleep, and play, and all the time this amazing machine, the human body, does everything we need it to. Nerves, muscles, skin, heart, brain, and hundreds of other parts work together day and night without stopping. New parts are made all the time, and when things go wrong, the body can often repair itself.
And there is no end to the extraordinary stories about the human body – from the blind man who rides a bicycle through the traffic, to the twins who met at the age of thirty-five, to the man who survived twenty-two hours in the snow on Mount Everest. Get ready to be amazed …
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
В© Oxford University Press 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No unauthorized photocopying
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the ELT Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work
ISBN: 978 0 19 423675 1
A complete recording of The Human Body is available on CD. Pack ISBN: 978 0 19 423667 6
Printed in China
Word count (main text): 10,489
For more information on the Oxford Bookworms Library,
visit www.oup.com/elt/gradedreaderswww.oup.com/elt/gradedreaders (http://www.oup.com/elt/gradedreaders)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cover image: Alamy Images (Sprinter, artwork/Sciepro/Science Photo Library)
Illustrations by: Peter Bull pp.14, 20, 53
The publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce photographs:
Alamy Images pp.5 (Brain anatomy/Pixologicstudio/Science Photo Library), 8 (Retina rods and cones/Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library), 16 (Healthy lungs/Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library), 16 (Human alveoli/Sciepro/Science Photo Library), 17 (Tanya Streeter breaking the No Limits sled free dive record/Buzz Pictures), 26 (Healthy digestive system/Pixologicstudio/Science Photo Library), 29 (Kidney cross section/Brain light), 49 (Evelyn Glennie/ZUMA Press, Inc.), 56 (Collage of photographs/Blend Images); Corbis pp.2 (Atletico Madrid’s Raul Garcia goes for a header/Maxim Shemetov/Reuters), 8 (Structure of the eye/MedicalRF.com), 10 (Woman drinking coffee/Peter Dresse