[Plant Kingdom]

1. Where is the Pampas?
2. The Prairies extend from central southern Canada through the mid-west of the USA right down into northern Mexico, to the east of the Rocky Mountains.True/false?
3. What are the Steppes?
4. What is the tree-line?
5. Where is the thundra?

[Human body]

1. How thick is your skin?
2. What are goose bumps?
3. What makes fingerprints unique?
4. What are freckles?
5. Most people have between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs growing on their head. True/false?

[The Modern Age]

1. Who dropped the first atomic bomb?
2. What is known as the Long March?
3. Atomic explosions create huge mushroom-shaped clouds of boiling gas and give off deadly invisible radiation. True/false?
4. What was the Cold War?
5. Who fought and died in the trenches?

Answers:

[Plant Kingdom]

1. The Pampas is the largest area of temperate grassland in the southern hemisphere. It stretches across Argentina, Uruguay and Southeastern Brazil, on the lowlands around the river plate.
2. True.
3. The Steppes are the grasslands of Asia. They cover an area from eastern Europe through Southern Russia right across Asia to Mongolia in the east.
4. Trees cannot grow all the way up a mountain, and the highest level for them is known as the tree-line. This varies according to the climate of the region but is generally about 1,800 in the Alps.

Trees at this level grow slowly and are often stunted.

5. The thundra lies north of the coniferous forest belt, in a band roughly following the Arctic Circle. It covers about 25 million square km from Alaska, through Canada, Greenland, Iceland across to northern Norway, Finland and Sweden into Siberia.

Only a small area of the Antarctic has similar conditions on the northern tip nearest South America.

[Human body]

1. Skin covers the surface of the body at a thickness of around 1.4 to 4 mm. Skin has two layers. The outer skin that we see and touch is made of hard, tough cells of dead skin. It is part of the epidermis. Below the epidermis is the dermis. It contains tiny blood vessels, sweat glands, nerve endings and the root of tiny hairs. Under the dermis is the layer of fat which keeps us warm.

2. Goose bumps are bumps formed on the skin by tiny muscles that make the hair on the skin stand up when we feel cold.

3. A fingerprint is made by thin ridges of skin on the tip of each finger and thumb. The ridges form a pattern of lines, loops or whorls and no two people have the same pattern.

4. Small patches of darker skin made by extra melanin. Exposure to sunshine increases the amount of melanin in the skin and darkness of freckles.

5. True.

[The Modern Age]

1. On August 6, 1945 the USA bombed Hiroshima in Japan killing 66,000 people instantly and injuring another 69,000. By dropping this bomb, USA and its allies hoped to bring World War II (1939-1945) to an end. Americans dropped another atom bomb on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9. On August 10 Japan surrendered and by August 14 the war ended.

2. A gruelling march across China covering 8,000 kilometres made by around 100,000 communist escaping their enemies. It began in October 1934 and lasted about a year.

3. True.

4. A time of dangerous tension between the USA and the USSR from mid 1940s to the 1980s. The two super powers never fought face to face but their enmity drew them into local conflicts in almost every corner of the world.

5. Millions of young men who fought in World War I died in the ditches they dug deep into the ground to shelter from enemy gunfire. The trenches filled up with mud, water, rats and dead bodies and many soldiers drowned in them or died of disease.