Page before the book starts : Introduction -- Shared space house : International Space Station -- Tiny bags of water you're made of : Animal cell -- Heavy metal power building : Nuclear reactor -- Red world space car : Curiosity Rover -- Bags of stuff inside you : Human torso -- Boxes that make clothes smell better : Washing machine and dryer -- Earth's surface : Physical map of the Earth -- Under a car's front cover : Car engine -- Sky boat with turning wings : Helicopter -- The US's laws of the land : US Constitution -- The US's Laws of the Land : USS Constitution -- Food-heating radio box : Microwave -- Shape checker -- Padlock -- Lifting room : elevator -- Boat that goes under the sea : Submarine -- Box that cleans food holders : Dishwasher -- Big flat rocks we live on : Tectonic plates -- Cloud maps : Weather maps -- Tree : Tree -- Machine for burning cities : Nuclear bomb -- Water room : Toilet and sink -- Computer building : Data center -- US Space Team's Up Goer Five : Saturn V rocket -- Sky boat pusher : Jet engine -- Stuff you touch to fly a sky boat : Cockpit -- Big tiny thing hitter : Large Hardon Collider -- Power boxes : Batteries -- Hole-making city boat : Oil rig -- Stuff in the Earth we can burn : Mines -- Tall roads : Bridges -- Bending computer : Laptop -- Worlds around the sun : Solar system -- Picture taker : Camera -- Writing sticks : Pen and pencil -- Hand computer : Smart phone -- Colors of light : Electromagnetic spectrum -- The sky at night : Night sky -- The pieces everything is made of : Periodic table -- Our star : Sun -- How to count things : Units of measurement -- Room for helping people : Hospital bed -- Playing fields : Athletic fields -- Earth's past : Geologic periods of Earth -- Tree of life : Life's family tree -- The ten hundred words people use the most : The ten hundred most common words in our language -- Helpers : Acknowledgments -- Sky toucher : Skyscraper.

It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something to a first-year student, you don't really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.

Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms ('datacentres') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button?

In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has ever wondered how things work, and why.--- summary provided by uk.bookshop.org