How a Straw Works

We started with a video about two guys in Britain who decided enough was enough. No more having to walk like 6 meters to get a coke from the fridge. They were going to use a giant straw to do so which though at first didn't seem educational, ended up explaining how a straw works. Before we actually learned much about it, though we had to test this out ourselves, we were given Capri suns and told to suck it. We learned that the reason why we could suck it up was because of a vacuum like effect. When we sucked in the juice, the air inside the straw was pushing the liquid down, but when we eliminated the air, the juice could be sucked up, but there was another factor as well. The air on the outside. It pushed on the juice as well, allowing it be sucked upward when there was little air on the inside, because it was stronger. We also learned when we tried this with a giant 10 meter straw that the narrower the straw was the easier it was to suck up the liquid. We, also, learned that even if there were such thing as a perfect vacuum, the water would only reach 10.3 or somewhere around there meters before it couldn't go up any higher, because the air pressure that supported it was too weak, well not as strong as the pressure on the outside. We learned that sucking up liquid using a straw was far more complicated than we imagined.