THING EXPLAINER (PB)

It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Where do things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? Addressing subjects such as our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), Randall Munroe explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.