TO HEAT SOMETHING UP IN THE KITCHEN PUT IT IN THE MICROWAVE
WRONG!!
this is maybe a bit pedantic and to be honest many physicists use this expression even though they know it is wrong.....
OK OK I confess..I say it too! because it is just a shortened form.

The box in the kitchen which we are talking about is the MICROWAVE OVEN not a microwave.
A microwave is an electromagnetic wave (like light) of length around a couple of centimetres. So to be perfectly correct, we put the pie into the MICROWAVE OVEN and into a beam of microwaves.

By the way...some people think that the pie or whatever it is absorbs the microwaves and they are stored up inside it. WRONG - microwaves are a means of transmitting energy (well, any waves are) and the ENERGY from the waves is absorbed by the molecules in the pie....mainly the water molecules which are made to flip backwards and forwards by the microwaves. If molecules gain energy they vibrate more vigorously and that means the temperature rises.

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