How does a toilet cistern work?

[impDragon66]

How does a toilet cistern work? I'm doing an assignment on it and the only explanation I can find is so complicated I can't understand it and it has a few typos

[woofgang]

http://www.howstuffworks/toilet.htm

[woofgang]

sorry, bad link http://www.howstuffworks.com/toilet.htm

[tomd]

What were you doing when they were handing out assignments?

[gazzawazza]

Very basically, water enter through an inlet. The level of the water is controlled by a stopcock which floats on the water and shuts off the flow through the inlet when the desired level of water is reached.

Inside the cistern there is an arrangement of pipework called the syphon. When the water enters the cistern, some of it enters the syphon through a one-way valve. When the toilet is flushed, the one-way valve actually lifts the water in the syphon up through the pipework and creates a syphoning effect which draws the remaining water from the cistern through the pipework. Simple and ingenious