The Gas Inside You: teacher key

Burps and Farts, grade 9 edition, written for 9th grade. Every gut holds gas from two sources, swallowed air and the work of bacteria. Gases from each source differ, certain foods tip the balance, and only a tiny share of the gas has any smell.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What is the medical name for swallowing air?
   • Flatulence
   • Aerophagia (answer)
   • Fermentation
2. A lab finds that a person's gas is rich in nitrogen. What does that point to?
   • Bacteria working on beans
   • Swallowed air (answer)
   • Hydrogen sulfide
3. Which starch does not produce gas as it is broken down in the large intestine?
   • Potatoes
   • Noodles
   • Rice (answer)
4. Why might two people have very different counts of how often they pass gas and both be normal?
   • There is great variability from person to person (answer)
   • Only one of them has bacteria
   • Normal means exactly 14 times a day
5. In this passage, what does the word chromatograph name?
   • A gas that smells like eggs
   • A machine that sorts a gas mix into its parts (answer)
   • A kind of fiber

Words

• aerophagia: swallowing air
• flatulence: passing gas
• raffinose: bean sugar
• chromatograph: gas-sorting machine
• flatologist: gas scientist