View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-do-the-lungs-do-emma-bryce

When you breathe, you transport oxygen to the body’s cells to keep them working, while also clearing your system of the carbon dioxide that this work generates. How do we accomplish this crucial and complex task without even thinking about it? Emma Bryce takes us into the lungs to investigate how they help keep us alive.

Lesson by Emma Bryce, animation by Andrew Zimbelman for The Foreign Correspondents' Club.