What statement causes a function to end and sends a value back to the part of the program that called the function?

The statement that causes a function to end and sends a value back to the calling part of the program is the return statement. When a return statement is executed, it terminates the function and can optionally pass a value back to the caller. If no value is specified, the function returns None in Python or equivalent in other languages. This allows the caller to receive the result of the function's computation.